Filling Your Glass + Advice on Becoming a Founder Over 40

Mission MightyMe's Catherine Jaxon talks candidly about the pros and cons of starting your thing over the age of 40.

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How Do You Fill Your Glass?

Reframing an old adage might just change the way we think about our agency not just in seeing the good, but making the good stuff happen. Words by Hannah Weil McKinley

The stuff that’s taking up real estate in my brain lately has centered mainly on the ideas of manifesting, of living the life you want, and getting clearer on how to get to the heart of it all. It’s what I set my intentions around when the New Year started—a tall order to remove the doubt in the face of uncertainty and embrace the here and now. 

A month or so into the process, and I’ve found that it helps to regularly check in. To activate the muscles working to decipher what feels good and what doesn’t and get stronger about saying “no” or leaning in where it feels right. The hard part is feeling that I’m falling short; tendencies to correct myself lead to negative thinking often and I’ve had to rework my brain again—and then again and again. 

This is a piece I’ve shared here before and one I’ll continue to share often because I so strongly believe in the effects of having a gratitude practice. My daily journal with prompts to find what I’m grateful for is a way I’m continually able to course-correct, without giving myself over to the harsher critic that lives in my head. 

Flipping through the pages there this week—where various inspirational quotes are printed at the top—I saw this bit of wisdom from Rwandan economist Donald Kaberuka: “I’m not interested in whether the glass is half empty or half full. I’m interested in figuring out how to fill the glass.” 

It grabbed me as I sat there, ready to scribble out the first three things that made me grateful that day—and where I have often written quickly “our health,” the “blue skies in San Francisco,” “my loving family,” it gave me pause. I thought about each of those things, which if you asked me what I feel gratitude for, are a near-automatic response. I let them sit there for a minute and thought about my focus on them, and how they fill my cup. How I’m making a small choice to see the goodness there, though I have no control over those things at all. 

I thought about what it might feel like to shift the focus from thinking about things that are filling or not filling my cup to thinking about my agency in filling my cup—and how everything I want for myself for the year, and maybe all the years after, might stem from that. How different that would actually feel. It’s a shift with immense possibility. One that might spark some magic in my thought process and how I approach the day—perhaps it could help rewire me?

Maybe you’ve seen this as often as I have while scrolling your Instagram: “Happiness is a choice.” It’s the same notion. 

I’ve started to consider this—and as a parent of young children, I realize how unbelievable this may sound—but there is some truth in the idea that there are no “bad” days. That even while there is chaos as we navigate these young and precious stages with our children, the bigger truth is that it’s our privilege, and a fleeting one. Instead of looking at the days’ wins and losses, writing off the bad days as we ready ourselves for another, we abandon the pressure for “good” things to happen, and focus on the goodness we’re making.

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We’re in the thick of it with writing and editing issue no. 8 of the print magazine, which means that we’ll be placing the official order with our printer soon.

We’ll only be ordering a tiny bit extra, so if you want to make sure you get a copy of all the goodness we’re working on, make sure you subscribe now. (Please note: If you start a new subscription now, issue no. 7 will ship out to you fairly immediately, followed by no. 8 in early April).

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Dependability counts for a lot when it comes to deciding what you have space for in your closet (and life).

1. I’ve been slow to jump on the Mary Jane trend, but this simple ballet flat iteration is a total win for me. I’ve already been wearing them a lot and anticipate living in them once the weather warms up just a bit.

2. On rushed mornings when my regular makeup routine isn’t on the table, the one product I’ll make sure to reach for is a brow pomade. I like a mascara’ish brush, and this one is perfect (easy to use and not too gloopy).

3. My 18-month-old and I traveled to see my mom last week. We’re devoted carry-on-only people, so everything non-essential gets jettisoned. This water bottle with a built-in straw was a total MVP since he and I could both sip from it.

4. I’m trying not to be a little annoyed that I just found a near identical dupe to my pricier Ring Concierge panther-wrap on TJ Maxx (and, yup, this one is also solid gold).

5. Alex Mill’s uber-versatile canvas bag was another hero for said carry-on trip. It’s meant to be pushed, smashed, and tugged around, and the two strap options are a hero (as are the snaps—it was easy to quickly close up when needed to avoid everything tumbling out). xLeah

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Every good conversation starts with a single question. Whether it's wondering how, why, or what, it's the place we jump off from—and into the moments where all the good stuff happens.

Leah asked Catherine Jaxon, co-founder of Mission MightyMe, about her experience starting a company over the age of 40, from the benefits of being older and wiser to the reality of feeling a certain pressure to make it work—“and quickly.” (P.S. Our kids are big MightyMe fans: Let your littles start snacking with code INKIND20 at checkout.)

Leah: So, what’s it like starting a company when you’re older, coming off of a big career and with certain things already in place in your life? The traditional “founder” story we hear seems to always be about people in their early 20s.

Catherine: I love that question.

It's a blessing and a curse, I guess. With age comes experience and some wisdom and some financial security, because I’d been working for a long time, and my husband had been working for a long time. It’s different than starting something in your 20s, but at the same time we had three children and decided to move away from big corporate jobs that are super secure with great health insurance and all the trappings that go along with them to go out on our own and forgo an income for a long time. That part was very scary.

It was hard to make the decision to jump in, but what was so motivating was the mission behind it. That's what fueled our passion and kept us going: that we started a business that we felt very strongly could have a positive impact on the world. I’m a big believer in business as a force for good. JJ, my husband, and I had always dreamed about, Wouldn't it be amazing some day to have our own business that was a force for good? And so starting Mission Mighty Me, we feel like we are on a mission that has the potential to have such a positive impact on children’s health by avoiding food allergies. As a food allergy family that’s really important as we know how life altering food allergies can be.

One other thing that I loved about starting this company in my 40s is that when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was a journalist with CNN in New York. I loved my career, loved my colleagues, but I worked around the clock.

My job was really my life, and once I had my first baby—I was in my mid-30s, I was a little bit older—I sort of realized that being the kind of mom I wanted to be and my career as a journalist were not compatible.

That was a really hard realization, because I didn’t have any flexibility and I wanted to be there for my kids. So what we’ve very intentionally done with MightyMe is create an environment where we have a whole team of women—almost all of them are moms, they all work remotely, and they all have total flexibility.

That is what I dreamed about when I was working for CNN, and it just wasn't feasible. We very intentionally created that. We actually had five of our seven employees in the last year have babies. We’re a new company, so this was not easy to figure out, but we figured out a way to make sure they all had maternity leave. We are a baby and kids [company], our whole mission is supporting family to lead healthier lives. How could we not ensure that the new moms on our team get to spend that time with their babies and be compensated for that?

I love hearing that companies really commit to what they believe in and put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

Regarding having the idea for Mighty Me, I’m curious what you’d say to women who want to pursue creating something but might not have found the just-right thing yet?

After you have a baby you suddenly realize there are a thousand things that you’re like, “Ahh, this could be better!” or “This is a pain point for me; I wish somebody would solve this or make this better.” Starting a family and having children is such a huge life change. You’re suddenly aware of all these things you might never have thought of before. 

I still have a file I started when our kids were babies of all the ideas that kept popping into my head. “Somebody needs to create this business, because there’s such a need for it!” At the time I was so in the trenches that I'd have these ideas and stick them in a file, and they’d stay there. But once we had our first and second children—they were about 15 months apart, so that was total survival mode. When our third child came along, we had waited. His sisters were four and five, so I felt like I could breath.