Success Memoirs

In Cowgirl Power, advertising CEO and cowgirl Gay Gaddis shares insights and examples for women to lead like fearless, risk-taking cowgirls: enhance and exude confidence, developing personal power on all fronts. As the owner of one of the largest female-owned independent agencies in the U.S. and former chairman of C200, one of the country’s top women’s business organizations, Gay Gaddis knows a thing or two about empowerment. Gay’s secrets of success have roots in the spirited strength of real cowgirls who were fearless risk-takers in everything they did.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

From the backyard hockey rink to the nail-biting suspense of draft days, Karl Subban shares tales of his family's unique hockey journey. Mixing personal stories with lessons he learned as a coach and principal - lessons about goal setting, perseverance, and accomplishment - How We Did It will allow other parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors to apply the same principles as they help the young people in their lives to identify, develop, and live their dreams.

Unprecedented is an extraordinary business book for extraordinary times: a collection of exclusive, first-person stories on leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic from twenty-nine chief executives at Canada’s most iconic and largest companies. These are unforgettable accounts from senior leaders at companies on the front lines during the pandemic—nursing homes, grocery stores, airlines, hotels, pharmacies, shopping malls—along with valuable lessons on crisis management. At their heart, these are stories about overcoming adversity.

John H. Johnson, the remarkable entrepreneur who founded the Ebony publishing empire, tells the story of his success. The wealthiest African-American in the US today, Johnson shares his rags to riches saga, from the many obstacles that confronted him to his ultimate triumph.

Danielle Bernstein spent her youth shopping at discount department stores, getting boozy in suburban backyards, and proposing marriage to every boy she dated. By age 19, she was a college dropout living in a West Village shoebox with three roommates and only six months to prove that her blog, @WeWoreWhat, could become a full blown career...or else board the train back to her mom's house. This Is Not a Fashion Story is the down and dirty tale of how a Long Island-born teenager became one of the most recognizable names in fashion.

In speed skating, a hard pivot is an aggressive shift of direction that requires courage, practice, and split-second timing. For Apolo Ohno, the most frightening hard pivot of his life didn’t happen on the ice—but rather, when he had to hang up his skates for good. “After my final Olympics, I felt confused, vulnerable, and adrift without purpose,” he says.

Most people try their best to avoid conflict. Bar Rescue host Jon Taffer understands that. Conflict can have negative results. It’s easy to think that the key to a happy workplace or marriage is to avoid conflict. In reality, that’s not the case—the key is to argue smarter. Enter the Toolkit for Getting Conflict Right. Taffer’s approach is focused on deliberate conflict—otherwise known as “conflict with a purpose.”

In life, moments arise when you have to decide your next move. When choosing whether to accept a new job, purchase a house, attend a school, or start a relationship, how do you settle on which direction to take? Trey Gowdy has found that most consequential decisions boil down to three simple options: start, stay, or leave.

Be Quick - But Don't Hurry! tells the story of the friendship between UCLA basketball coach John Wooden and former player-turned-successful television executive Andrew Hill, while sharing the lessons and secrets that hold the key to managing creativity in the idea-driven economy of the 21st century.

How to Come Alive Again is a funny, honest, broken audiobook written by an author who could be described as the same. It is a combination of self-help audiobook, memoir and polemical lifestyle guide. It lays out the basics for mending your life, accepting yourself, changing what doesn’t work, killing the worst of it and learning to live through depression. It’s an audiobook about what to do when you’re an anxious, depressed, spaghetti-brained mess in a society that still prefers us to act normal and never talk about our mental health.

In “The Trail to Success: A City Manager on Leadership, Management, and Civic Empowerment" Howard W. Brown Jr. shares his inspiring journey from a first generation college student to one of the youngest and few Black city managers in the nation. This memoir is not just a chronicle of Brown's rise, but also a candid account of the challenges he faced along the way. From a youthful marriage and subsequent divorce, raising two children, financial struggles, multiple relocations, to the relentless scrutiny of the media, Brown's journey was far from easy.

National icon Willie Nelson has evolved over the years from country music outlaw swimming against a whiskey river to a Zen-like figure of wisdom and contentment. In this autobiographical collection of life advice, The Tao of Willie, one of America's truest hearts reveals the spiritual and practical lessons learned from decades of hard knocks and good bounces.

Soulshaping is the inspiring memoir of an archetypal "male warrior" - a trial lawyer - who struggled to find his heart and a more authentic, soulful path. Rivetingly personal and profoundly universal, this book is for anyone who has heard a whisper of something truer calling out to them amid the distractions of modern life.

As an incredible glass-ceiling breaker and the woman who brought timeless television shows like The Game and Being Mary Jane to cable, Debra Lee has been the visionary responsible for elevating Black images and storytelling for decades. Now she’s telling her own story, in an intimate and eye-opening tale about the triumphant and tricky moments of a career in entertainment.

The youngest of her parents’ combined 21 children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner alongside her brothers. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to the big city - or really anywhere with central heating. At 15, she moved out of her family home and started her own fresh produce delivery business with nothing more than an old pickup truck. Two years later, when the family farm faced inevitable foreclosure, Frey gave up on her dreams of escape and took over the farm.

Looking at myth foundations as well as archetypal themes, this illuminating book probes universal questions like: Who am I? What is my journey? Where is home? With excerpts from beloved memoirs, practical advice, and writing prompts, listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the rich scope of the memoir genre. And in turn, they’ll come out with a better grasp on their own life trajectory and their place within the rich tapestry of the human experience.

You Are Worth It is a memoir about the War in Afghanistan and Kyle’s heroics, yes, but it also is a manual for living. Organized around the credos that have guided Kyle’s life (from “Don’t Hide Your Scars” to “Call Your Mom”), the book encourages us to become our best selves in the time we've been given on earth.

In The Anatomy of a Calling, Lissa Rankin, MD, makes a simple yet revolutionary claim: We are all, every single one of us, heroes. We are all on what Joseph Campbell calls "a hero's journey"; we are all on a mission to step into our true nature and fulfill the assignment our souls were sent to Earth to fulfill. Navigating the hero's journey, Dr. Rankin argues, is one of the cornerstones of living a meaningful, authentic, healthy life.

In 2004 Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on the Harvard Business School's plush campus. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.