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Watch time: 1h 20 min | Anastasia's hero's journey
Imagine it's 1989. Anastasia Soare steps off a plane into Los Angeles airport, carrying her three-year-old daughter, speaks zero English, and doesn’t have a single dollar in her pocket.
Today her business, Anastasia Beverly Hills, is worth over $3 billion.
How did she do it? She lived the hero’s journey.
Her ordinary world was a country where store shelves sat empty and neighbors went to bed hungry. She knew life was meant to be more.
In a Beverly Hills salon years later, she looked at a photo of her over-tweezed eyebrows and remembered her Romanian art teacher's lesson: eyebrows shape every emotion on the face. That was her call to adventure and the moment she knew what she was here to do.
Refusal came from the world around her. Her boss refused to let her focus on eyebrows. The Beverly Hills landlord refused to rent her a room. Her own husband didn't believe she could build a business in America.
But Anastasia had mentors and allies who had already shown her the way. Her mother, who ran a secret dress-making business back home, had worked endless hours because she loved making women feel beautiful. Her art teacher handed her the golden ratio that she’d built her entire business on. And an immigrant landlord, who saw himself in her, gave her the room she asked for.
At 40, she crossed the threshold. She poured her $5,000 from savings into a room in Beverly Hills and there was no going back. Then came the ordeal when she had to teach customers one-on-one how to use her product line in person. It took twelve years of flying to Nordstrom stores across the country every single weekend, with her daughter selling products beside her.
After realizing success, she wrote a book full of her insights so others would know:
“If I was able to do it without speaking the language, without having money, without knowing anyone, then anyone could do it.”
Instead of reacting to life, she chose to level up at every stage of the hero’s journey.
Which stage will you level up next?
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