Simran Kaur says no one is born with self-doubt.
As she sets out to mentor two Kiwis as part of Air New Zealand’s Dream Seats initiative, Simran Kaur talks to Varsha Anjali about achieving her dream - and helping others achieve theirs.
Simran Kaur believes no one is born with self-doubt.
To her, self-doubt is a learned behaviour - one that her parents neglected to instil in her. Even when Kaur was struggling in physics at school, her parents, whom she credits as her greatest mentors, never told her, “maybe physics isn’t for you”. Instead, they got her a tutor. Her grades improved.
“They’ve always taught me that if you don’t know something, you should go learn it,” Kaur tells the Herald.
The 27-year-old went on to become the founder of Friends That Invest (formerly Girls That Invest), a media company striving to make investing education more accessible. She’s also a best-selling author, a podcaster, named in Forbes’ 30 under 30, and the 2024 Young New Zealander of the Year.
This month, Kaur adds another feat to her impressive resume as one of Air New Zealand’s Dream Seats ambassadors. Launched last week, the campaign aims to help Kiwis achieve their dream by offering free flight tickets to a destination that will help them get closer to their professional goals. Its six ambassadors, including Kaur, Dame Valerie Adams and Josh Emett, will also each personally mentor two Kiwis.
“I’m very, very excited to mentor ... I love teaching, I love talking to people, and I love helping them figure out a plan for how to make their dreams come true,” says Kaur, who grew up around educators. She was even teaching as a kid, running makeshift tutoring classes in chemistry for her friends at the temple - because she enjoyed it, she says.
This wasn’t always Kaur’s dream. Like so many of us, her dreams changed over the years. At one point, it was to become a fashion designer, which, by her own admission, is “comical” to think about now.
“My friends know me as the worst fashionable person,” she laughs. Despite the lack of fashion sense, her self-belief never wavered. “I didn’t go, do I dress well?”
Society tends to frame the act of going after one’s dreams as a brave thing to do. But Kaur doesn’t think courage has much to do with it. Or even hard work.
“When you’re younger, you have such strong dreams and very little doubt in yourself. And I feel like as we get older, the dreams are big, but the self-doubt starts to grow.”
People can start to internalise things that may never have been said by asking themselves, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What can I do?’ The investor explains.
When Kaur was at school, she wrote a speech about the importance and power of failure. She remains steadfast in that belief today. Many successful people, in her view, “fail upwards”. What that means is they try again smarter, not harder. Rinse and repeat.
She also spoke about failure when asked what it takes to achieve dreams.
“I think it’s a mixture of luck and not doubting yourself, and just being okay in failure because you will fail at times, but you just keep going.
“[If] you just keep trying smarter, you eventually get to whatever it is that your dream is.”
While having the right mindset is crucial, so is broadening your horizons with experience. That is to say, travelling may present one with opportunities they may never have received if they stayed in their comfort zone. For Kaur, it played a “monumental” role in shaping her professional career.
She recalls one of her first international trips when she went to the United States for a TEDx Talk at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania to discuss the importance of women investing and how empowering it is to have financial literacy. She met so many people. The trip, she says, “blew my mind”.
“Being able to travel has just opened so many doors and [it let me meet] such amazing women around the world.”
Kaur’s brand is popular, having sold more than 100,000 books, reaching 100,000 newsletter subscribers and over 10 million downloads of the Friends That Invest financial education podcast.
But her appeal is also diverse. Kaur’s audience spans many cultures, experiences and backgrounds, and yet, she says there is a common thread. They ask her: Are values around money similar in every culture? She’s learned that it is.
“We all want to be able to not worry about money. We all want to be able to look after our family. We all want to have a rainy day fund. And those concepts are just universal,” says Kaur, adding that travelling opened her eyes to the fact people are more similar in money values than they are different.
If mentees expect Kaur to drip-feed solutions, they will likely be disappointed. Her approach to mentorship is less about being someone with all the answers, and more about being “a sounding board” and ”someone to hold [mentees] accountable to those dreams".
And she can’t wait.
“It’s gonna be amazing to meet them and to hear what their dreams are and just to allow them to expand their view on themselves and expand their ability to achieve those dreams.”
Varsha Anjali is a journalist in the lifestyle team at the Herald. Based in Auckland, she covers travel, culture and more.