START WHERE THE DOOR OPENS: Work, Wisdom and Survival in the Age of AI. - Softcover

Masala, Mimi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1048313441 ISBN 13: 9781048313444

Publisher: Mimi Masala, 2026

Synopsis

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.
In this book, you will meet:

• 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

And you will encounter a set of tools you can use in your own life:

• 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...

Start Where the Door Opens is for the young person who has been told the door is closed. For the parent who does not know what to say to their son on the couch. For the executive who has been dismissed in her own meeting rooms and returned with sharper ideas. For anyone at any stage of any life who has been carrying the sentence the world is against me, and is ready to put it down.
The door is not closed. It has never been closed.
Walk to it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mimi Masala
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1048313441
• ISBN 13: 9781048313444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 246