It’s been an unexpected career path off the back of winning a reality TV show, but speaking to Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast, Ask Me Anything, Lim said that she knew when she applied she wanted to see how far she would go.
“When I think back to how I felt at that point 15 years ago, what spurred me to enter it was, I felt this inner need to really test myself and challenge myself to see how much I loved food and cooking.
“I did it as a test to myself. I was like, I’m gonna enter this and see how far can I go, how much grit have I got to actually try, and see how much I really love food.”
When she won, Lim said there was no manual or guidebook to tell her what to do next, and not a lot of guidance on how to capitalise on the moment.
“Do you know what the advice that we had from the production company [was]? Per se, this is exactly what they said was, ‘whatever you do, don’t give up your day job’. That was the advice I got in the week following having won the show.
“Because they must have seen it before, people win these reality shows and stuff, and then they think, ‘oh, my life’s sorted and my career’s sorted, and everything’s gonna be sweet’. And then, whoops.”
She said you can’t assume a career will come your way simply because you won, and it takes a lot of hard work to make the most of the moment.
“I think that in most cases it’s probably good advice not to give up your day job. And so I didn’t, I went back to work, but there was just this thing in me... I was like, I think the biggest regret I could ever have is not trying to achieve my dream.
“And so I ended up giving up my job and just completely threw in the towel. And I had no income, no real set plan of what I was going to do.
“And then, somewhere along the line there, Carlos [her husband], I kept saying to him, this is our one chance, our one opportunity, you need to give up your job too and come along this journey with me if we’re gonna make anything of it.”
When he decided that the corporate world he was in wasn’t for him, Carlos quit his job.
“Then so we took off from there, and he was very much like, ‘okay, first step is we need to build brand Nadia’.”
She said it was a big risk doing that – it involved working for free for a number of years – and it isn’t something she would consider doing now they have three kids.
But the risk has paid off long-term, leading to several successful businesses.
One such business is Royalburn Station, a 1200-acre farm in central Otago, where Lim and her family now live.
It has been eight years since they bought it, six since they moved in, and is the last food-producing farm on that scale in the area, done so with an ethical, sustainable focus in mind.
Lim said it’s taking a lot of learning to get things right there.
“We didn’t realise the ride that we were in for. And it’s really been a rollercoaster – if people have watched the TV show Nadia’s Farm, which did three seasons, we’ve had some, some great wins, but man, we’ve had some bad, bad fails as well, like monstrous, disastrous fails, that we just didn’t know... we didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
Despite the struggles and the terrible finances that come with running a farm, Lim said they love learning and have enjoyed learning about food production.
But that’s not the only lesson.
“What I’ve really learned, the overall big learning is that things aren’t black and white. There are more shades of grey than there are black and white.
“If you haven’t been in it, it’s very easy to have an opinion about how our food should be produced and how we should farm, and what we should do for the environment and all those things.
“But until you have been on the land and you have done the groundwork yourself and had your hands in the soil and had your neck on the line to make it all work, I kind of think you can’t really have an opinion.”
Listen to the full episode for more from Nadia Lim on success, taking opportunities, and why she looks for variety in the work she does.
The 10th anniversary edition of Easy Weeknight Meals is in bookstores this week.
Ask Me Anything is an NZ Herald podcast hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett. New episodes are available every Sunday.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
