Start With Yourself

A New Vision for Work & Life

By: Emma Grede

Narrated by: Emma Grede

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Emma is an inspiring force, a modern day business mogul and visionary…[This book] should be your guide if you are starting a business, thinking about starting a business, already in a business, want to make a better business for yourself and want to be a better person in that business, I highly recommend Start With Yourself…It’s a good reminder that a well-lived life starts with you.” —Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Podcast

“Emma Grede is a modern executive for the influencer age…Start With Yourself makes the case for putting yourself first in work, life, and child-rearing. It’s Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” —The Wall Street Journal

As seen on Good Morning America, TODAY, Morning Joe, ABC News Live, and Meet the Press.

Start With Yourself is a game-changing, no-BS guide for anyone seeking meaningful success on their own terms. It’s an essential framework that will give you the tools and mindset to unlock your full potential in life and business—straight from a woman who defied all the odds to become a serial entrepreneur, a cofounder of culture-defining global businesses, a nonprofit champion, and the host of the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast. All while raising a family of four children.

Based on the factors of her early life—she’s the child of a working-class single mother and grew up in a rough neighborhood in East London and dropped out of high school—you’d never guess that Emma Grede would go on to become one of America’s richest self-made women.

This makes Grede unique, but she’s convinced you can do it, too: Start With Yourself is a blueprint to her mindset and how she thinks about business and life, structured in easy takeaways, so you can immediately apply her philosophy to what you’re trying to build and create.

Among her most blazing insights, Grede identifies what she calls “Old Thoughts”: stale thinking, outdated ideas; set-in-stone rules ingrained into the culture about work-life balance, the crassness of money, and the unseemliness of ambition—that aren’t actually rules at all. They’re biases, Grede insists, system errors, and we must strike them from our minds so that we can gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals.

Ultimately, this is a book for everyone tired of feeling like a bystander or passenger in their own life. Grede offers tangible and applicable-right-now solutions to create a mindset, an overall system of thought to manage emotions, clarify ideas, and illuminate the right next step—while always staying positive.

It’s about gathering yourself after failure. It’s about being accountable but also forgiving yourself. It’s about not expecting shortcuts while never being bashful about grabbing them when they appear. It’s about pushing hard for wins and never apologizing for your dreams.

Above all, Grede offers a new vision for work and life that encourages readers everywhere to take responsibility for their own thinking in order to achieve personal and professional success at the highest levels.

Wow, a book that keeps it 100

I knew of Emma but never fully followed her, this book was booking. Emma takes you from humble beginnings to stepping out and keeping it 100. I could have listened to her all day, I love how she doesn’t sugarcoat and gives her insight, she is honest about motherhood, family and business. Every chapter was invaluable and she made me realize I need to step it up. So basically she was the brand and the Kardashians were only figureheads

Loved it!

There’s been a lot of discourse surrounding her approach, but I can appreciate Emma’s honesty and willingness to abide by her own rules.

Incredible

I came across Emma on Tik Tok and a lot of what she said I felt reminded me of my wife and her work ethic. I bought the book for her as a gift but I didn’t want to be left out on what she read so I downloaded the audible version. Wow! This book is absolutely incredible. Sure it’s geared toward women but as a husband and a father of 2 girls (also a son) I thought about how useful understand the plight of women of what women in business go through that I could use these tips and encourage them. I also run a hair salon along with my wife so I live in a very women centric world and as we grow our business and begin having employees I’d like to empower them in the same way. I already recommended this book to my cousin (personal chef and business owner), my friend, my mom and my brother. This was worth every second.

Start with yourself

10000/10 recommend! I love Emma, felt like she was talking directly to me the whole time!

Honest. Straight to the point. Relatable

Emma is the example you need to remind yourself that coming from a poor background doesn’t mean you should stay poor