From Resilience to Freedom: My Chapter in 'Ma Résilience en Affaires'

 The invitation I almost turned down

I got a message asking if I would contribute a chapter to Ma Résilience en Affaires, a published anthology on entrepreneurial resilience in Quebec.

My first instinct was to say no.

Not because I lacked stories. I had plenty. But I was not sure my story was the right kind of story for a book like that.

Resilience is a word people use when they want to sound serious about hard things. I was not convinced I had the right to claim it.

Then I thought about the Pony

When I was seventeen, I had a beat-up car. I called it the Pony. It was my refuge. On the worst nights, when things at home were at their lowest, I would go sit in that car and think.

I did not know it then, but I was building something. Not a business. Not yet. A way of being. A refusal to let the difficulty of a moment define the direction of a life.

That is what resilience actually looks like. It does not look like strength. It looks like sitting in a cold car deciding you are not done.

What I wrote about

I wrote about the gap between what people imagine entrepreneurship is, and what it actually requires.

People imagine risk. They are right. What they do not imagine is the weight of that risk in the middle of the night, when the client is upset and the team is unsettled and the numbers do not add up.

I wrote about how I learned, over many years and more than a few expensive mistakes, that resilience is not a personality trait. It is a decision you make, repeatedly, before you feel like making it.

That is the chapter I submitted.

Why it mattered to me

Solpak was already growing by the time that book was published. We had clients, a team, a track record.

But I had not yet sat down and put the origin story into words. Writing for Ma Résilience en Affaires forced me to do that. It forced me to trace the line from a seventeen-year-old in a cold car to a founder running a serious packaging company in Quebec.

The line was not straight. It never is.

But it was there. And once I wrote it down, I could see it clearly.

That clarity is something I now try to give every entrepreneur I work with. Not a shortcut. A map.