- Respected and prolific chef.
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Award-winning author of eight books.
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Award-winning broadcaster featuring regularly on TV and Radio.
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Presenter of A Taste of Home on TV1.
- Founder and creator of the unique Fête Accomplie Culinary Adventures
http://www.petamathias.com/cookingschool.html
I have had four careers. I started off as a nurse, and after I become a registered nurse I moved into counselling and worked for years with people with drug and alcohol addictions and alcoholics. Then I thought, these people are never going to get better, I’m over this. I decided to become a chef. Now I spend most of my time communicating about food through different media.
All these things are basically extensions of motherhood. I am what the French call a ‘manqué mere' – a frustrated mother. I was brought up to become the perfect wife and mother. I am the eldest of six and have already been a mother to them, and I just turned all those skills that I was taught by my mother into professions.
There is a lot of theatre in what I do. It’s not just about the food. There has to be an entertainer in you, to get people to want to eat that recipe. I was in the right place at the right time when I came back to New Zealand in 1990. I had been working as a chef in a restaurant in Paris for years, and wanted to change careers- get out of food. I made the fatal mistake of writing a book about my life in Paris, which threw me straight back into food again!
When the book came out in 1994, TVNZ asked me to do Taste New Zealand. Suddenly everyone was treating me as an expert, and I had to become one! I was a chef, not an expert. That show was supposed to last a couple of years, and it’s been 13.TV takes up an enormous amount of time, and it can have its boring moments. You spend 90 percent of the time waiting around and 10 percent working. You need to be alert, have make-up on, and the dress has to be tidy. I use the down time wisely though.
When I got the call from TVNZ I went white, I was astounded. But I just picked up the ball and ran with it. It’s something that you already have in you – that ability. You can probably learn it. We mostly just learn it as children – when a boy doesn’t like you, you learn that you can’t be miserable all the time! You move on. It amazes me that some people haven’t learned that. It’s about action and moving forwards.
It’s like the question of happiness. Some people are really knocked by life’s bad moments and others are not, because some have an innate ability to be resilient and positive and move on. My focus is on the latter.
I’ve written eight books. That is the great thing about being offered something that just appears to fall out of heaven – I would not even have known that I could write. I started with a recipe book with notes about my life in Paris and my publisher liked the way I wrote.
When you turn your passion into an income you work all the time, but it’s so enjoyable that it doesn’t matter. Everything is about “content” – for instance, over Christmas I went to Hawke’s Bay and the market was fantastic, so I decided to write a story about it.
You have to learn how to capitalise. I’m going to Sydney in March for my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary and I thought, what can I do in Sydney? I talked to New South Wales Tourism and now I’m going to write stories for them. They’re thrilled and I’m thrilled. I look for win / win situations all the time.
Everybody has an equal chance in my mind. Lots of people can think. Lots of people can cook. With successful people, other people often think, ‘They have something I don’t have.’ The only difference is that someone who achieves their goals knows how to pick up the ball and run when it gets kicked into their court.
You can be an entrepreneur, but you still have to get that lucky first break. There are some things that I have not been successful in and I have tried really hard at.I never revisit things that I have failed at. Nevertheless I have kept all my rejection letters, and I feel like going to those publishers and showing them on occasion! I don’t of course.
I had a plan when I came back from France, and I wrote it down. I wanted to do gastronomic tours and I wanted to write. I have been doing these fabulous cooking schools in France, and this year I’m doing two in France and two in Marrakesh. http://www.petamathias.com/cookingschool.html
There is no short cut, unless you inherit money. Because I work freelance I have periods of working very hard, too much, and times when I do nothing, so I just take the highs with the lows. I seldom take holidays because I don’t need them – breaks come naturally as part of working freelance.
It’s too easy to fall back into lazy cooking ways. For people who want to be more creative and nutritious cooks, the hardest thing is just doing it. It is quite time-consuming to eat fresh food, as you have to shop every day or so, and you have to eat all those fruit and vegetables – they go bad quickly. If you are eating steak and chips it is easier and fills you up faster, but the vegetables and fruit are the key to health and beauty.
The world needs much more slow food, and good fast food. Fast food works because it’s full of fat and sugar and salt and is satisfying, and doesn’t cost the producer much to make. It is just a matter of education. I consulted on a school lunch menu. You generally can’t tell teenagers what to eat, but they loved it. Mind you, they came from good-income homes. When Jamie Olivier did his the parents were passing chips through the school gates!
Jamie Oliver is an example of somebody who picked up the ball and ran with it. He was just a commy chef in a restaurant in London, a nobody. He was discovered when they were filming at The River Café, a fabulous restaurant in London. He is truly exceptional and inspiring.
You are very privileged and clever if you can figure out how to leap from doing something that just pays the mortgage, to something you are passionate about. It took a long time for me. When I wrote my first book in 1994, and then started filming Taste that same year, I had nothing. I was completely broke.
Go back and look at your old school reports I say. I learned that from a book somebody gave me called What Colour Is My Parachute. If you don’t know where to go next in your career, go back and see what you were good at in school. My parents sent them to me from Australia in a big box. Can you imagine how weird it is to look at your school reports when you are 50? I just sat on the floor and wept. There was this girl that I knew nothing about. I remembered I was very good at writing, and English and French. I thought,I have to write.
I am working on two fabulous books. One is a book of women’s accessories made out of food, shot by an Italian photographer, and I am writing captions to go with them on the facing page. It’s beautiful. The other project, which is sensational, is a book about women. Not about food or travel but all about women. There are ten chapters all about the things that touch women’s lives – work, fashion, men, sex, relationships, music, travel, happiness. It makes for light reading but has serious information. It’s quite funny and slightly outrageous.
You have to be completely blinkered. You can’t listen to anything negative; you have to be abnormally single-minded. It sounds dumb but you just have to act. If you want to write, sit down and physically write.
You have to burn the bridge – you have to be prepared to drown. There must be danger, or you won’t change. It’s not easy if you have a family to support, but you have to be a risk taker. You must leverage things, create action. Just do it!
I didn’t consciously get rid of people who sapped my energy, but I realized in my 30s that I needed to. I moved on from some people and felt terrible – meanwhile, they were fine! Now I can see those people coming a mile away.
I can cook and I can sing. I was going to be a professional singer but it didn’t work out. Now I only sing in the shower.
Goalgetting Tips for today
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Find out what you are passionate about & what you are good at- look at your old school reports.
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Then do something each and every day towards doing more of these two things.
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Be prepared to change careers – several times
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Always be prepared for your big moment. When luck and preparation meet, you find success.
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The difference between success and failure is often the ability to keep going when you feel like giving up.
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Write a book about what you know –and on a subject that people might find interesting.
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Learn to be blinkered and hone your ability to focus on what is important.