For entrepreneur Arati Sharma, joy is creating at home and work

Arati Sharma is a Toronto-based entrepreneur and investor. After almost a decade at Shopify, she left in 2021 and launched Backbone Angels, a collective of women in tech supporting women and non-binary founders. Sharma is also the co-founder of Ghlee, a ghee-based skincare brand rooted in South Asian traditions

In this instalment of the series “Joy Diaries,” Sharma describes where she finds small moments of daily happiness.

With everything going on in the world, what brings me joy are the simple but most precious things in life: Family, food and spending time with good friends. Working with my hands, being creative and trying new recipes – I even do this on the most stressful days and it really relaxes me.

Cooking a simple pizza with my five-year-old son and my husband, or the three of us having a crafting night-in, grounds me. It’s as if time stops and I have no reason to pick up my phone.

Recently, something that’s brought me joy has been travelling with our son. This summer, we took a weekend away with my in-laws in Muskoka, and seeing him so confident in the water, ordering his meals at dinner and with almost zero screen time brought so much joy to me. Our job as parents is to give our children wings, and that is both beautifully joyful and heartbreaking, so seeing him grow his independence and confidence left me feeling proud but also with a twinge of missing the baby phase.

A small joy I look forward to every day is my morning Americano. My husband makes excellent espresso at home with all his coffee gadgets, and he’s really perfected it. He makes the best short Americano in the city.

I’m the co-founder of a Canadian beauty brand, so another daily joy for me is seeing a notification from Shopify that someone has purchased products from our store.

As an entrepreneur, active angel investor and mom, joy for me has to be baked into my day. I went years spending time only working. While I have no regrets – our early years should be in the grind building our professional lives – I wish I had scheduled more breaks to journal, watercolour or cook more at home. I’m trying to get better at making space for things that bring me joy, such as spending even just half an hour of focused play with my son each day, which grounds me. I completely forget about everything else, including the news, work and other responsibilities.

As millennials, we’ve been through so many world-changing events in our lifetime. The news we’re served via short posts and images on our phones are heartbreaking, to say the least. If we don’t lean into everyday joy in our lives, ideally by giving and serving our own community and loved ones, you can feel so helpless and spiral. I’ve had to lean into the simple joys and remind myself to feel gratitude for the time I have with loved ones.

As told to Katherine Singh