The year was 2015 — a good eight months after 99dresses went down. I was out for my daily jog around town, finishing on the cute little road where I grew up. When I was in primary school, my brothers and I used to step off the afternoon bus, place our backpacks over our heads, cover our eyes, and run as fast as we could back home. Within seconds, the magpies — black and white birds with sharp beaks — would drop down from the neighboring trees and aggressively swoop at our shields like angry little dragons. We'd make it home, slam the door shut, and do it again the next day. Dodging angry magpies was a quintessentially Australian game.
There were no magpies to worry about on this particular day, over a decade later. The passage was safe in the summertime and only turned treacherous for a few months in the spring. After sleeping in a windowless room in New York, I couldn't get enough of the sunshine.
That's what my days back home consisted of: sunshine, writing code, reading and re-reading The Holographic Universe and Conversations With God, thinking, dreaming, exploring new ideas.
Every night at the dinner table my father would ask, "Nikki, how did you enrich your life today?" There were only two answers that didn't elicit his playful mockery: "I learned this and this and this," or "I worked." He'd just spent ten hours operating on eyeballs to put food on the table and a beautiful roof over my head. If I wasn't learning or working, then I felt like an entitled millennial mooching off her parents.
You see, both my parents are highly educated, and they'd built a prosperous kingdom together as partners in the game. Their value system was simple: education and work ethic. Sacrifice today so you can enjoy a life of security and stability in two decades.
They drilled two financial lessons into us children:
- Don't borrow money to buy a liability, like a fancy car or a holiday. If you can't pay cash for it, then you haven't earned it. Only borrow money to buy assets that generate more money.
- Don't get into a career where you're ultimately paid for your time. The amount of money you earn is limited by the number of hours in the day.
That second point was ironic, given how hard my father and mother worked. My parents owned their own medical practice and a portfolio of properties. Dad was an eye surgeon; Mum was the businesswoman who managed their affairs.
During my time living with them, I'd open the french doors to the second-floor balcony every morning, sit on the beautiful wicker chairs, and drink coffee. I was surrounded by the luscious fruits of their labor — singing birds, blue skies, green gardens full of hedges and flowers, and a little cumquat tree.
Zac always joked that I was a Disney princess with a perfect Disney family. One time, my Sydney crew — Bryce, Pandora, Zac, and I — dropped in on my parents as we were driving down south. Mum and Dad prepared a big barbeque feast for us all. As we sat at the table, Mum asked Bryce about the tech startup he was working on. She could talk shop with him all night — about product, fundraising, teams. Bryce left that dinner saying, "My mother barely knows what I do. You're so lucky, Nikki."
And I knew that. I did. Mum and I were close. We'd sit on the balcony in the morning, having long mother-daughter chats together.
She'd created a beautiful life for herself, but it didn't come without sacrifice. My mother earned multiple degrees and had big plans to use her skills in the real world. Then she fell in love and married my father.
Dad was just starting his career as an ophthalmologist after years and years of study and training. The competition was fierce in big cities, but there were no ophthalmologists in regional areas of Australia. My parents packed up their life in Sydney, moved to a country town, set up a little practice, and were booked out on day one.
Mum dreamed of building a big medical center for the local community. She and Dad purchased the perfect building for the project, convinced some other doctors to move down from the city, and were subsequently betrayed by them. I saw my parents go through it multiple times. I saw mercenaries trample their kindness and generosity, use them, and then discard them when they got what they wanted.
Dad is a gentle soul, and he didn't want to work with other doctors after that. He hated the drama. He just wanted to take care of his patients, provide for his family, and have a peaceful life.
My mother had four children and a husband to support. She continued running their little ophthalmic practice — but it wasn't the big medical center she dreamed of creating. She felt stifled; like her potential wasn't being realized in a small country town. Her degrees were pretty pieces of paper on the wall. Everything she learned came in handy, but her skills and knowledge were never fully put into practice. Her soul never experienced that concept of Self.
Over the years, her entrepreneurial ambitions faded. She stopped fighting fate and accepted her role as a teammate and supporter. She created a beautiful family, a beautiful home, a beautiful marriage, a Disney life — but I felt like she lost a part of herself in the process.
That's why my mother lived vicariously through my entrepreneurial projects. She always wanted to talk about them, to brainstorm ideas, to discuss everything, all the time. There came a point in 99dresses where I said, "Whenever I talk to you, you want to help fix my problems. You're watching this business from the sidelines, but you're not getting beaten up in the trenches every day like I am. I'm tired and overwhelmed. I don't want to call you up and talk business. I just need you to be my mother right now."
She backed off after that. It broke my heart. Maybe if I'd let her help me, 99dresses wouldn't have failed. Maybe I wouldn't have been standing there on that street, rejoicing at the lack of magpies in my wake. Maybe everything would've turned out differently.
Or maybe not.
A few weeks prior to that daily jog, I'd been scrolling through Pinterest when an image caught my attention. It was a photo of a little bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare & Company, full of mismatched books and wooden ladders resting against shelves.
It looked so magical. Oh, how I wanted to experience something magical again — the kind of magic I used to thrive on as an entrepreneur. Building tech products was the closest thing I'd experienced to the kind of sorcery I'd read about in works of fiction.
I decided, then and there, that I was going to visit that bookshop in the next twelve months. I'd already deduced that reality was a non-dual paradigm, but I still hadn't figured out how to control the illusion. I had a hypothesis, though, and this provided the perfect opportunity to test it.
I devised an experiment. I was going to convince my mind — my internal model of reality — that I was in Paris.
So that's how I found myself jogging through my quaint hometown, projecting holographic images of cafe-lined Parisian streets onto my surroundings. I could look up and see the Eiffel tower in the sky. As I ran past Australian dairy cows and horses, I soaked up the French ambiance in my mind.
I began studying French on Duolingo. Every day I'd spend fifteen minutes learning new vocabulary in preparation for my impending trip.
I'd close my eyes and run my fingers along the books in that Parisian bookshop, as if I were right there, in the room.
After a few days of my experiment, I began seeing French things everywhere. My ego called it confirmation bias. Perhaps it was. Yet I distinctly remember saying to my mother, "I have a feeling I'm going to France this year." She'd smiled and said, "That's nice, Nikki," knowing full well that I couldn't afford it. I hadn't worked since 99dresses went down, except for a few hours of consulting here and there when I visited Sydney.
A couple of months went by. I stuck with the experiment.
And then it happened: a man I'd never met before tagged me in a tweet.
Toulouse, I thought. Where's that?
I performed a quick google search and smiled to myself. Toulouse was in France. Of all the places in the world, I'd been invited to speak at a conference in France.
Seven weeks later, I was physically standing in Shakespeare & Company — the little Parisian bookshop from Pinterest. I ran my hands along the spines of the external books — just like I'd done internally in my mind a few months earlier. I laced up my sneakers and wandered through the streets of Paris in real life, revisiting a place my consciousness had already been. It felt like my imagination had somehow leaked into physical reality.
The trip to Toulouse nourished my soul. It was the beginning of summer and I experienced the very best of French hospitality. Wine and cheese were as abundant and free-flowing as laughter and fun. On my second night, I met a group of entrepreneurs who I clicked with. We spent the rest of the week dancing together in little Toulouse nightclubs, talking until four in the morning on the steps of gurgling fountains, picnicking by the river, enjoying the beautiful sounds of Fête de la Musique on the cobbled stone streets.
I flew to Paris after Toulouse and spent ten days aimlessly wandering around the city. I sat by myself in Parisian cafes, and at my solo baguette-and-brie-fuelled picnics, re-reading Harry Potter books like I was a child again — starting with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
On that trip, I rediscovered something I intuitively knew but had somehow forgotten: magic.