That was four years ago, for our tenth anniversary. She was pregnant with Rome, deep enough into it that the countdown had already started, waiting for the day she could fill her lungs all the way again. When I bring it up now, she does the math out loud, a little delighted by it. "It was four years ago, I was pregnant with Rome, who is four years old now." Then she tells me the strangest, sharpest thing, the kind of line that reframes the whole conversation before it has really begun. If we had run the two interviews side by side, she says, almost nothing would be different. "The only thing that would have been different is my breathing, because I was so pregnant. But other than that, I'm still in the same head space. Things are a little bit more chaotic, absolutely, but I've just become a better multitasker."

Four years. Two daughters instead of one on the way. A second company. A network show shooting five days a week. And the woman inside it reports no change to the operating system, only the load. After an hour with her I am certain that is mastery, not denial.

This is our summer issue, and summer is the right season to understand Shay Mitchell. Summer is the trick of taking the most unforgiving thing in the sky, that flat, punishing heat, and turning it into the whole reason for the fun. Nobody schedules a pool day in February. The heat is the pressure, and the response is collective and a little defiant: get in the water, turn the off-hours into something worth remembering. Shay does that with her entire life. She takes the conditions that would flatten most people, the pace and the responsibility and the chaos of a house with two kids in it, and treats them as the reason to be having the best day. She is what happens when a person decides the heat is not the problem. The heat is the invitation.

She will tell you plainly what she runs on. "My vibe on life is literally just go, go, go," she says. "Especially now, having two kids, having some companies, and being on a TV show that requires a lot of my time and forces me to stay in LA, it is a lot. It is a lot. I love it, and that's really what it is." She is careful not to sell burnout as a virtue, she believes in balance, but she also does not pretend to be built for stillness. "I think I would go crazy if I just stood still for a long period of time."

Most people say they love their work as a reflex. She means it in a way that is almost inconvenient to her sleep schedule. "I'm gonna be that annoying person that is just too excited to wake up. I don't like to go to sleep at night because I'm excited for the day to start. I go to bed super late because there's so much stuff I still feel like I need to get done, and want to get done." And then, so there is no confusion about whether this is luck or work: "I feel so grateful that I don't wake up and have to go to a place that I'm not excited about. But I've also busted my ass to get to that place where I like what I do."

The gratitude and the grind, said in the same breath, neither one canceling the other. That is the thesis.

Ask her where the energy actually comes from, and she does not reach for a mission statement. She reaches for zippers.

"I really love what I do. I could talk to you about bags all day, talk about zippers. I could look at bags all day. I do look at bags all day." She is eight years into BÉIS now, the travel brand she built into a fixture, and she talks about it like a company that has not started yet. "We haven't even come close to leaving the gate. We're still like, we haven't even taken off with all the things I want to do." Her second Company “Rini” she loves just as much, a line of products she uses on her own girls and on herself. And underneath all of it is a motor she describes without any performance of humility. "The reason I'm able to do ten things at once is because I have a fire burning at all times, because I'm passionate and I love it. It doesn't come from anything else. I'm not money driven."

The people only chasing the exit do not fall in love with the middle. Shay is in love with the middle. "I love the whole creative process of coming up with a concept for a product that has taken a year to bring into fruition. I love the glam process, I love all of the journey part, almost sometimes more than I love the destination." She says the same about travel, then proves it with a list most people would call the boring part. "I actually enjoy the preparation. All the appointments before a vacation, feeling your best right before you go, packing your bags, getting the snacks ready. I love all that. Then I love being on an airplane, and I actually like airplane food." She laughs at herself and does not take it back. "I enjoy all the elements. When people are like, I can't wait until I get there, I'm good. Let's just keep going. I'm excited for tomorrow, but right now I'm enjoying today."

This is why she reads as a case study in free will more than a celebrity profile. She has decided, on purpose and repeatedly, to want the life she already has. Not the finish line. The airplane food.

Turning the harsh into the advantage

Here is where the summer logic gets real, because she does not pretend the heat never lands. "Even today, things still feel like a grind," she says. "There are days where the cylinders are not going in the directions I want." A bag design takes a year and comes out weaker than she pictured. A collection has to be paused off the timeline she wanted. A pop-up misses. She names the hiccups instead of hiding them. What she does with them is the whole trick.

"Because I like to stay positive, I'm always asking, what's the lesson I need to learn from this? How can we better ourselves from this?" And then the line that could be tattooed on the inside of summer itself: "If everything was always good all the time, that would be so boring. Sometimes I need a couple hiccups to take me out of the comfort zone. It's always been my mantra, if you're comfortable, you're not learning." She likes a little discomfort the way she likes an unpredictable trip. "Sometimes there's hiccups in travel. Okay, you figure it out. It changes the path you thought you were heading down, and that's okay. Enjoy the view from this perspective, as opposed to the one you thought you were going on."

She keeps it in proportion with one sentence I have not stopped thinking about. "Nothing is that serious in my life. There are serious things in the world, let me preface, but in my life right now, knock on wood, everything is manageable. My worst day is somebody else's dream." She is not showing gratitude performatively. She is doing accounting. If your worst day is another person's fantasy, the harsh conditions were never an emergency. They were just the weather. You get in the water anyway.

She is precise about the machinery underneath it. Shay is a manifester in the disciplined sense, pen to paper, not a screen. "I really am a pen-to-paper type girl. I write down goals that I want, and I still do that to this day." The grammar matters to her. "When I make my manifestations, I don't say I can't wait for this. I write it like I love this, as if it's right now, because it is.”

She traces the wiring straight back to her father. "My dad played Tony Robbins, gave me Robin Sharma books. To this day he sends text messages to me, my brother, and my mom, good morning, today is going to be the best day ever. That's what I was born into. I don't know anything else other than looking at the glass half full." The follow-through is a belief she states as physics. "The more you think about positive things, the more you attract, because you're focusing on those. If I start to think about negative things, then it's going to go down that road, real quick. I'm a big believer in being that magnet." What she wants to magnetize is not attention. "I want people to leave and be like, I left feeling inspired, or I left energetic. Everybody I come across, I want you to feel at least a teeny bit better than when I came across you. Definitely not worse."

She even guards the words she says out loud, treating language as part of the same instrument. "You won't hear me say I'm starving, or oh my god I'm dead. Words are super powerful." She corrects her daughters the same way. "They'll say we're starving, and I'm like, no, you're absolutely not starving. You may be a little hungry, let's go get some food. Or, oh my god I'm so stupid. No, you're not. You're smart." She says it lightly, but it is a serious position. If you believe you are a magnet, you do not hand the magnet to your worst thoughts.

I told Shay something true on set, that I think about legacy constantly. I have a ten-year-old son, and in a few months I move to LA to build this magazine into something I can eventually hand to him. The weight of that word sits on me most days. So I asked her whether motherhood had turned up the volume on legacy for her.

Her answer took the floor out from under the question. "I don't think about legacy at all. I've never used that word. I don't feel any connection to it." She was not being coy. She kept going, and it got sharper. "Once I'm gone, I'm gone. I've raised, to the best of my ability, two little girls. I hope they have the best lives, and I've set them up to feel strong and confident and able to take on whatever life throws at them. That's all I can do. Whether anyone else knows me or has that legacy vibe, I'm good. I'm kind of good." What she replaces it with is smaller and, I think, much harder to argue with. "I'm here selfishly to live this life for myself and to leave it a better place. That's not really legacy. That's just what I feel we all owe as humans. Leave this world a little better than when we came into it."

I have interviewed people who would never say that out loud because it costs them the myth. Shay says it because she does not want the myth. She wants the day. "People can roll their eyes when I say this, but I don't start companies to be a billionaire or have a unicorn. Money is great, it makes things easier, I won't lie about that. But I really love what I do." The fire, again. Never the trophy.

Different speeds on the same highway

Shay and I are both Filipino, and near the end she leaned into it. She feels the comparison trap too, the scroll, the sense that everyone else sold a company yesterday, and she says so, which is what makes the rest of it land. "I'm not going to say I don't have days where I'm like, I should be doing more. We're so consumed with social media, seeing what everybody else is doing. Everybody's a trillionaire in this day and age. She sold for a billion, she sold for ten billion. You can't help but feel like you're not going at the same speed."

Then she reframes the whole race off the board. "But that's not to say that's the wrong speed. We're all at different speeds. It's like a highway. We're all going to get to the same spot, whether you're in the fast lane or the slow lane. And we don't all have to be a unicorn billionaire company. Money doesn't mean you're going to be happy." She points, the way our people always point, to the places with the least and the most joy. "Every time I've traveled to other countries, I'm like, they're having such a better time. They don't live in a mansion where they need a walkie-talkie to have dinner with their kids." The prescription is almost aggressively simple. "Turn off the phone, let's touch grass, literally. Look at the small things. I had a beautiful matcha this morning. My daughter had pancakes. Find the joy in the small moments, and you'll see how many of those you have, all added up. It's a lot better than you think."

These are the days

I told her, honestly, that I needed to hear a lot of this, and that thousands of people reading it will need it too, the permission she gives to stop gripping the outcome and just live inside the day. She waved off the grandeur, because that is who she is, and gave me the ending instead.

"No two days are alike, and that's not just because of what I do. That's for any of us. There's no way you could have the same day twice. So this day could be slightly better. I don't know what tomorrow's going to be, and my life changes all the time, and I love that." She has already fast-forwarded to the version of herself who will look back on all of it. "When I'm a she-cold granny drinking wine in Italy at eighty-eight, I'm going to be like, those were the days. I was running two companies, I was on Baywatch, I had two girls, I was busy as hell, but I had a good time." Then, the closer she handed me without knowing she was handing it to me. "Time is a thief. Let's make the most of it and enjoy it while we're the youngest we're ever going to be, today. Let's go."

She has a ring that says LETS FUCKING GO. She measures a day by one question, whether she gave it everything she had. "If I fully give every day my all, that's all I can do. I go to sleep, I get a peaceful sleep, I wake up, and I do it again. I don't give a fuck about what anybody else is doing. Good for them. I love my life. I'm not in competition with anybody."

She’s not someone that waits for a destination, or obsesses over building a legacy, or goal chases her way into a version of life that finally counts. She is not a prisoner to the past, or the future like many others are.

She lives in the right now, truly free.