Aimee Joshua was a Woman of the Week in March 2020. She was nominated then for her work as a podcaster and coach helping people pursue their dreams. We’ve asked her to update you on what has changed in her career since then:
“I went back to school in January of 2023 with my twin sister to get my Executive MBA (EMBA). It's never too late, right? Since I've been out of school for a while, being in school has changed. It's either harder, or I'm just out of practice, I’m not sure which. Perhaps it’s because I can't study the same - when I was an undergrad doing school full time, it seemed a little bit easier! But now, juggling family responsibilities and my day job I sometimes wonder, how do I get it all done? I certainly have become better at planning, but I also have to give myself grace because not everything works the way I want it to. Not everything will get completed 100%.
“You may have heard of the ball theory, where you're juggling a number of balls. Some are glass, some are rubber, some are easily dented, etc. You have to choose what is going to be fragile - which are the ones you give attention to? Which ones are you going to allow to be sacrificed if they drop? That’s a good example of the past year for me. Perhaps it’s also a good description of why my podcast went on hiatus during this time. I knew that if I continued that on top of everything else, I probably would have lost my mind!
“But in its place, my mom and our family continued our YouTube cooking channel, now called ‘Ammini Aunty’s A Pinch of Kerala.’ At the end of 2022, we felt like it was time to publish a cookbook, even though I had just applied for my EMBA. We began looking through all of the recipes we had completed and got them edited. In May, we finally decided, ‘If we're going to do this, now’s the time.’ We experienced some loss last year within our family. I realized life is short, and I felt like God wanted us to do this. We reasoned, If God was calling us to do this, everything would work out, even though we had no experience writing or editing a cookbook. We didn't even have the funds to self-publish without tapping my parents’ retirement savings.
“We decided to do a Kickstarter–which is the most open and worldwide of the fundraising platforms– because it would allow us essentially to accept pre-orders, and would show us whether anybody would even be interested in buying our cookbook. I researched local publishers and found one we liked in New Jersey. They quoted us $40,000 to print 1,000 copies. With Kickstarter, you have to reach your goal or you don’t receive any of the money. We decided, ‘If we're trusting God, we're trusting God.’ We stepped our goal down to $25,000 to play it safe and ended up raising $34,000.
“I think this is when it hit my parents that this was actually happening, and they realized., ‘Oh my goodness, we actually have to do this now!’ We asked our family members to give us edits and suggestions on our first draft. It slowly grew from 120 pages to 180–and as we were creating content for our YouTube channel, we took photos and put the book together. We promised everyone we would have it done by the holidays. Since we didn't want to sacrifice quality, we pushed ourselves through five rounds of edits. By the end, I began to get tired of the book from looking at it so much! And because the edits had taken so long, the publisher told us that to produce it in time for the holidays as we had promised, they would have to print it without sending us the physical proofs. Can you imagine printing 1000 copies of a book, sight unseen? To keep our promise, we said, ‘Just do it. God's taking care of us.’ We looked over the digital proofs, the pages looked right, and we said, ‘Yes.’ But twenty minutes afterward, I had this gut feeling that something was wrong with the interior file, because it included the cover and back page, so it would be double printed! I went back to them, and they halted the presses and fixed it. There are a lot of similar examples of God’s mercies and trust that I could tell you we experienced from this project. It's amazing what God can do.
“Thankfully, the cookbook has been a hit! People have given us so many compliments. We're very proud of it, and the feedback has been comments like, ‘It tastes like my mom's cooking”, which really makes my own mom’s day (my dad’s, too!). My mom had dreamed for such a long time of creating a cookbook, but I never would have imagined this for ourselves.
“It might seem funny to say that I see God’s hand in a family cookbook–but mainly I see His hand in thinking outside of the box and trying something different. If you dream and allow possibilities to happen with Him by your side, He will show you what's possible. Everyone thinks that life unfolds like a textbook formula you have to follow. We need to understand that it's not and can be unpredictable. You might feel like everybody else is somehow exceptional, but the truth is that everybody's on their own weird journey, you know?”
Thank you, Aimee!
The Joshuas’ cookbook, Ammini Aunty’s A Pinch of Kerala, is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The ebook is available on Kindle and will soon be available on Apple books.