Say Yes Before You Feel Ready
Catherine Goh went from a pasar malam stall to AirAsia's youngest CEO by saying yes before she felt ready. How to act when you have no idea what you're doing.
Most people wait until they feel ready before they say yes to anything big. Catherine Goh did the opposite, and it is the reason she runs a national brand today instead of the one she trained for.
Goh is the CEO of Santan, the food brand AirAsia spun out of its in-flight menu. Before that she was executive assistant to Tony Fernandes, and before that a fresh graduate who dropped out of medical school. Before any of it, she was a kid shouting “le long, le long” over a fruit stall at the pasar malam. Her story reads like luck. Look closer and it is mostly one decision, made again and again: say yes first, work out the details later. The rest of this is how she did it, and how you copy the move without needing her particular run of luck.
1. Say yes before you feel ready
The one line worth stealing from Goh is this: say yes even when you do not feel ready. She has watched too many capable people spend, in her words, 3,000 years deciding whether they are ready for something, and miss the thing entirely. If you never say yes, there is nothing for the environment to train you on. The opportunity needs you to step into it before it can teach you anything.
Her own break is the clearest example. Someone in management recommended her for a role as Tony Fernandes’ EA. She did not submit a CV. She did not know what an EA was, and had to Google it, back when the job title was rare enough that most people assumed it meant personal assistant. She also did not know who Tony was, and genuinely asked “which Tony.” She said yes to the interview anyway. When he offered her the job, she said yes again. Nothing about her felt ready. She just went, and learned on the way.
That is the whole move. Saying yes does not mean you can already do the job. It means you get into the room, and the room is where you learn to do it.
2. The nerve came from the pasar malam
Where does someone get the stomach to say yes to a job they cannot even define? For Goh, it was built early, at the family stall.
She grew up helping her mother sell fruit, mornings at the wet market and nights at the pasar malam, because stock that did not move in the morning had to be shouted out and cleared by evening or it became wastage. As a kid, shouting “le long, le long” actually worked, so she learned to hustle young. She also learned the money lesson underneath it. The family was poor and carrying debt, seven people to feed, and at one point her father lost control of the cash flow. A loan shark came to the store every single day. Because they were on friendly terms after so many years, when her mother was busy with customers, young Catherine would open the drawer and hand over that day’s repayment herself. She understood cash flow, that running a business is not only about making revenue but controlling the money and paying down what you owe, before she had a word for it.
She does not frame any of that as adversity. It was just the day to day, and the lesson she took from it was to stay grounded. Good day or bad day, you stay grounded, you do your best, you keep going. When your baseline is that low, your tolerance for uncertainty is high, and most career setbacks stop looking like catastrophes. As long as it is not life and death, it is not that big.
3. When the brief is vague, move anyway
Saying yes was step one. What tested her was what came after, and it is the part most people get wrong.
The day after the interview, Fernandes told her they were flying to London the next morning. Not “meet at the airport,” but “I’ll see you in the plane.” She did not know the weather, the schedule, or why she was going. She did not ask. She packed, found her own way onto the flight, and because she was in economy while he was up front, she quietly asked the cabin crew to let her know when her boss was awake so she could go over. When she reached him, he handed her a list of about 15 tasks, some of them things a whole team would normally run, including organising a ceremony at a royal palace she had never heard of. Then: “we’ll keep in touch.” No brief, no explanation of half the names involved.
Most people meet a moment like that with one of two responses. Either “I’m not trained for this,” or “your instructions weren’t clear, so this is on you.” Goh did neither. She did not read “we’ll keep in touch” as toxic or unfair. She treated it as a problem to solve: here is the task, how do I move it forward. One of the 15 was to summarise every email in his inbox, an inbox she describes as insane, and there was no ChatGPT to lean on. Her first attempt came back as long as the original emails, and he asked why she had handed him back his own mail. So she learned the real expectation, one or two sentences per email, and did it again.
The word she keeps returning to is stuck. She did not want to be stuck, so she tried everything, knowing she would get some of it wrong. Getting corrected was how she learned what “done” actually meant when nobody had defined it for her.
4. The problem is not thinking too much, it is feeling too much
Ask Goh whether young workers overthink and she pushes back on the premise. They do not think too much, she says. They feel too much.
Thinking is useful. Feeling too much is where the damage happens, because you generate a pile of unnecessary emotions, imagined slights, worries about tone, a sense that something is unfair, and those emotions push you toward worse decisions. When Fernandes’ PA messaged to ask why she had gone silent on her first day in London, Goh did not hear a scolding. She heard a fair point: if you do not tell people where you are, how are they meant to know. The task in front of her was simply to update him. That was it. The rest was noise.
She calls it linear thinking, and pairs it with a rule about mistakes: make them as early as possible. People forgive a junior who is visibly trying, and they give second chances, because everyone can see effort. The bigger risk is not the mistake but freezing so completely out of fear of being wrong that nothing moves at all. Her test for whether an emotion deserves your attention is blunt: do you actually need to feel this, is it even relevant to the problem in front of you. Most of the time, it is not.
5. Change your plan, don’t change your dream
None of this means the yeses always paid off. The biggest one nearly broke her, and how she handled it is the last piece.
Before AirAsia, Goh was in the United States on a medical programme, working four jobs to cover her living costs and part of her fees while her sister paid the rest. She scored top marks. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, her sister’s business went under, and the funding vanished, with her fees running about three times a local student’s and no scholarships available to her. A counsellor offered to spend months chasing financial support with no guarantee, but she was on a student visa and could not wait. She dropped out. She let herself feel sorry for it for a few days, then made herself move on even while it still hurt, because staying in the pain changed nothing.
That is where her sharpest line comes from: change your plan, do not change your dream. The goal can stay fixed while the route to it changes completely. If someone had told that med-school dropout she would go on to build a national food brand with no background and no connections, she would have laughed. Life is not fair, she says, but it tends to have a better plan once you stop trying to control every detail of it. She made one brave decision at a time, and eventually one of them worked out.
What to actually do with this
If you take nothing else from Goh’s story, take these:
- Say yes before you feel ready. Nobody feels ready for the step that grows them, and the yes is what unlocks the training.
- When a task is vague, make your best attempt and show it early. A wrong first draft that gets corrected beats a perfect plan you never started.
- Separate the task from the feeling. Before reacting, ask whether the emotion is even relevant to the problem in front of you. Usually it is not.
- Make your mistakes early, while the stakes are low and people are quick to forgive. The cost of freezing is higher than the cost of being wrong.
- When a route closes, protect the dream and rebuild the plan. The path changing is not the goal dying.
Goh still calls herself that fruit-stall girl, and says she keeps her around on purpose, as a reminder to stay hungry no matter how comfortable things get. What carried her from the pasar malam to the CEO chair was not really talent or timing. It was the habit of saying yes to things she could not yet do, and moving before she felt ready.
