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Start Where the Door Opens: Work, Wisdom and Survival in the Age of AI.
Paperback
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ISBN10: 1048313441
ISBN13: 9781048313444
Publisher: Mimi Masala
Published: Jul 17 2026
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781048313444
Publisher: Mimi Masala
Published: Jul 17 2026
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A thirteen-year-old girl in Apartheid South Africa wrote a letter to the Vice President of McDonald's International.
The reply came months later, on real letterhead: not now.
She kept the letter. She kept walking. Twenty years later, she owned three McDonald's franchises.
Start Where the Door Opens is the story of that girl, and the four decades of work, service, and quiet defiance that followed. It is also an argument. In a country that has been told there is no work, that the pie is fixed, and that AI will take every job, Mimi Masala tells a different story - one drawn from her own life, from the lives of her mother and grandmother, and from the trays, counters, kitchens, and doorways she has walked through since 1985.
The reply came months later, on real letterhead: not now.
She kept the letter. She kept walking. Twenty years later, she owned three McDonald's franchises.
Start Where the Door Opens is the story of that girl, and the four decades of work, service, and quiet defiance that followed. It is also an argument. In a country that has been told there is no work, that the pie is fixed, and that AI will take every job, Mimi Masala tells a different story - one drawn from her own life, from the lives of her mother and grandmother, and from the trays, counters, kitchens, and doorways she has walked through since 1985.
In this book, you will meet:
The door is not closed. It has never been closed.
Walk to it.
- A grandmother who could not read English but taught her granddaughter to write
- A mother named Edith Makgokolotso who drove her daughter past houses they were not permitted to enter under Apartheid, and told her one day she would live in them
- A young graduate hiking to work before sunrise, standing on a road, refusing to stay home
- A corporate executive who rose through McDonald's, bought her own franchises, and returned to build one of the most quietly effective housing programmes in South Africa
- The multiplication plan - how one tray of scones becomes five businesses
- The two arenas of Need and Desire, and how to walk from one to the other
- Why hiring managers prefer the employed, and how to escape the trap
- How AI has dismantled the gatekeepers, and what this means for anyone with a smartphone and a willingness to begin
- The sentence that changes an unemployed person into a working one: I am currently working on...
The door is not closed. It has never been closed.
Walk to it.
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