Mangano Joy - Inventing joy: dare to build a brave & creative life

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For all the dreamers in the world.

NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE OR WHERE YOURE FROM, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

JOY MANGANO

O ne night when I was ten years old, I saved my dog, Duke.

It was the middle of winter, and I was sitting in my parents bedroom trying to block out the sounds coming from downstairs. My parents were arguing about something again, and I just wanted a quiet place to sit and be alone. Anyway, I looked out the window and saw Duke, our beautiful black German shepherd, in the backyard. Duke could sometimes be grumpy with strangers, but he was always a sweet little puppy dog with me. In the backyard, our small in-ground pool had frozen over, and Duke was walking on the ice.

Suddenly the ice cracked, and Duke fell through.

No one noticed but me. My parents were too busy downstairs, and my brother, John, was in his room. I ran out the back door and found Duke scratching at the edge of the pool, trying desperately to get out. I was small for my age, and I was skinny as a stickI used to wear thermal underwear under my clothes just so I wouldnt look like I was starvingbut still I found the strength to grab on to Dukes paws and pull him out of the water. He was shivering, and all four of his paws were cut and bleeding from scratching against the side of the pool.

I took Duke inside and wrapped him in a towel, and I put some bandages on his paws, and I sat with him and held him until he warmed up and calmed down.

Over the next two days I changed Dukes bandages four times. It was hard, messy work, and probably kind of painful for Duke. He didnt like it, and neither did I. And when I was changing them for the fourth time, a thought formed in my head.

There has to be a better way.

So I came up with an idea for these special bandage booties for Duke. The outsides of the booties were like socks, but on the insides I layered gauze pads that I could just take out and replace. Id slip them on Duke and pull them tight, and that would be that. At first, Duke didnt know what to make of the booties, and hed sort of clomp around in them and look at me as if to say, Are you kidding me with this? But after a while he got used to them and didnt seem to mind. I remember seeing him walk by in his little booties and thinking he looked so cute.

I also remember thinking, Okay, they work. The crazy booties work. This is better .

Fast-forward thirty years.

I was on vacation with my three young children, Christie, Bobby, and Jackie, in East Hampton on Long Island. One afternoon, the children and I were sitting on a bench outside a bakery on Main Street, eating ice cream. I watched as a man came out of the store holding two white cardboard pie boxes, one in each hand.

The man tried to push the screen door open with his elbows, but it kept swinging back and nearly knocking the boxes out of his hands. Finally, he escaped the store. As he walked to his car, he stacked one box on top of the other and balanced them with one hand while digging around in his pocket for his keys. He got them out but dropped them on the sidewalk. Somehow, he recovered and made it into his car with his two pies still intact. It was a little adventure no one paid any attention to but me.

And as I watched the man struggle with his pies, a thought formed in my head again. The exact same thought as when I was ten.

There has to be a better way .

And in that very moment, I saw it. Clear as day.

As a mom, I baked a lot of cupcakes for my childrens birthday parties and school events, and the only thing big enough to carry twenty-four cupcakes was a flimsy cardboard shirt box. Id put cellophane or tinfoil on top of the cupcakes, but inevitably the icing would get smushed.

But what if... what if...

... what if there was a box specially designed for the job?

Something with, say, six sides and a little shelf that gave you two separate layers for pies or all twenty-four cupcakes? And maybe the shelf could come out and youd have enough room for a triple-layer cake! And what if the bottom popped up so the box folded up flat for easy storage, unlike those big plastic tubs that take up all the room in your cabinets? And what if it made life easier for moms everywhere who were constantly baking cakes and cookies and pies for school events and birthday parties and could never really figure out how to carry them?

Why couldnt such a box exist?

I grabbed the kids and rushed back to where we were staying. I found some paper and started scribbling drawings of the box. I spent the whole day reworking and refining the design. I saw the entire process in my head: how I could make them, what theyd be made of, the many ways they could help out mothers like meeverything. It was all there, in the air, waiting for me to pluck it out.

Just about sixteen months later, the Piatto Bakery Box was bornand it went on to become one of the most popular products of its kind, ever.

That moment outside the bakery was an epiphany for me. It was the moment when I realizedtruly realizedwhat I was really good at. You see, other people in the store and on the sidewalk saw the man struggling with his pies, but no one paid him any attention. No one saw what I saw. As far as I could tell, no one viewed the situation quite the way I didoh, theres a problem, so whats the solution? But for whatever reason, I did see it that way. It was just the way my mind worked in that instant. And it made me realize, like I never really had before, that this is who I am, and this was what I do.

I see objects that arent there.

I solve problems no one asks me to solve.

I look at life in terms of meaningful, positive, impactful change, even if its just a better pie box.

Im an inventor, and I make things.

This is the part of the book where Im supposed to tell you about all the things Ive made and everything Ive accomplished. Some of you may already know parts of my story, but many of you might not, so the idea is to set up who I am and give you a reason to keep reading. To be honest, Im not really thrilled about this part. How do you write about your successes without sounding like youre bragging?

Some people get someone else to do it in a prologue or a forewordsomeone notable who can get away with singing your praises to the heavens. But I didnt want to do that, either.

I want this entire book, start to finish, to be like a conversation between you and me. Like youre sitting with a friend, feet up on the sofa, listening to her tell a story.