Luvvie Ajayi Jones is known for her trademark wit, warmth, and perpetual truth-telling. But even she's been challenged by the enemy of progress known as fear. She was once afraid to call herself a writer, and nearly skipped out on doing a TED talk that changed her life because of imposter syndrome. As she shares in Professional Troublemaker, she's not alone.

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.

What happens when you realize you’ve had the career of your dreams, but you don’t have the life of your dreams? This was the stark reality facing Sheri Salata when she left her 20-year stint at The Oprah Winfrey Show, Harpo Studios, and the OWN network. She had dedicated decades to her dream job, and loved (almost) every minute of it, but had left the rest of her life gathering dust on the shelf. After years of telling other people’s makeover stories, Sheri decided to “produce” her own life transformation.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless well of magic, his illustrations timeless favorites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and so many more are his troupe of beloved and uniquely Seussian creations.

In this instant Sunday Times bestseller, leading psychotherapist Philippa Perry reveals the vital do's and don'ts of relationships. This is a book for us all. Whether you are interested in understanding how your upbringing has shaped you, looking to handle your child's feelings or wishing to support your partner, you will find indispensable information and realistic tips here. Philippa Perry's sane, sage and judgement-free advice is an essential resource on how to have the best possible relationships with the people who matter to you most.

If you've been dealing with the loss of a job or home, or have had a health or financial crisis, Start Where You Are abounds with lessons that offer hope and provide a road map for starting anew. This is also the ideal book for anyone ready to launch a personal or professional undertaking, or someone who simply wants to break through the cycles and thinking that have limited his or her potential in the past.

At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.

Comedic superstar and internet entrepreneur Kountry Wayne’s unflinchingly honest, often outrageous, but always hopeful and hard-won lessons on having faith.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Sophia Chang is a badass of the music industry. As the daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, she grew up shunning the “model minority” myth. Armed with a fierce sense of independence, she moved to New York City and infiltrated the world of hip-hop, yet remained mostly in the shadows of the artists she supported. With her debut memoir, Sophia Chang is finally ready to grab the mic for herself.

Tell a stranger that you talk to yourself, and you’re likely to get written off as eccentric. But the truth is that we all have a voice in our head. When we talk to ourselves, we often hope to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead. When we’re facing a tough task, our inner coach can buoy us up: Focus - you can do this. But, just as often, our inner critic sinks us entirely: I’m going to fail. They’ll all laugh at me. What’s the use?

If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas’s You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urgent message to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and take control of your life is one he wishes someone had given him when he was a teenager—lost, homeless, failing in school, and dealing with the challenges of being a young Black man in America.

Henry at Work invites listeners to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard—surveying land, running his family's pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond—and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions.

Ebony’s parents were high school sweethearts and married young. By the time Ebony was born, the marriage was disintegrating. As a little girl she witnessed her parents’ brutal verbal and physical fights, fueled by her father’s alcoholism. Then her father tried to kill her mother. Those experiences drastically affected the way Ebony viewed love and set the pattern for her future romantic relationships. Despite being an educated and strong-minded woman determined not to repeat the mistakes of her parents - she would have a fairytale love.

At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.

If you've been dealing with the loss of a job or home, or have had a health or financial crisis, Start Where You Are abounds with lessons that offer hope and provide a road map for starting anew. This is also the ideal book for anyone ready to launch a personal or professional undertaking, or someone who simply wants to break through the cycles and thinking that have limited his or her potential in the past.

Everyone imagines top CEOs as larger-than-life figures who do things no one else could. But deep down every good business leader is an everyman who combines vision and high energy with the ability to connect with all types of people and learn from them

Wyclef Jean is one of the most influential voices in hip-hop. He rocketed to fame in the 1990s with the Fugees, whose multiplatinum album, The Score, would prove a landmark in music history, winning two Grammys and going on to become one of the best-selling hip-hop albums of all time. In Purpose, Wyclef recounts his path to fame from his impoverished childhood in "Baby Doc" Duvalier's Haiti and the mean streets of Brooklyn and Newark to the bright lights of the world stage.

Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.

Winner of two NAACP awards for his writing, bestselling author Hill Harper is an acclaimed actor known for his role on CSI: NY. A Brown University and Harvard Law School alum, Harper is also a passionate public servant. In this book he offers comforting advice for today's youth through his own wisdom as well as that of such luminaries as Michelle Obama and Angela Bassett.

How to Stay Motivated provides you with clear and proven techniques to use to enhance relationships, improve your self-image, set and achieve goals, and so much more! Apply these winning steps from the motivational master himself to build a better, more productive, satisfying life for yourself and your family. Change your picture and change every facet of your life.

Leslie Odom Jr. burst on the scene in 2015, originating the role of Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical phenomenon Hamilton. Since then he has performed for sold-out audiences, sung for the Obamas at the White House, and won a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. But before he landed the role of a lifetime in one of the biggest musicals of all time, Odom put in years of hard work as a singer and an actor.

One of the most dynamic and globally recognized entertainment forces of our time opens up fully about his life, in a brave and inspiring book that traces his learning curve to a place where outer success, inner happiness, and human connection are aligned. Along the way, Will tells the story in full of one of the most amazing rides through the worlds of music and film that anyone has ever had.

Valentin Chmerkovskiy, the world championship-winning and beloved Dancing with the Stars ballroom dancer invites fans into his life as never before, sharing the experiences, including the failures and successes, that have shaped him, from his early childhood in Ukraine to growing up as an immigrant in the US to his rise to international fame.

Every one of us endures setbacks, disappointments, and failures that can incapacitate us. But we don’t have to let them. Instead, we can use these events as opportunities for growth. In Things No One Else Can Teach Us, Humble the Poet flips the conventional script for happiness and success, showing us how our most painful experiences can be our greatest teachers.

The Invisible Heart takes a provocative look at business, economics, and regulation through the eyes of Sam Gordon and Laura Silver, teachers at the exclusive Edwards School in Washington, D.C. Sam lives and breathes capitalism. He thinks that most government regulation is unnecessary or even harmful. He believes that success in business is a virtue. He believes that our humanity flourishes under economic freedom. Laura prefers Wordsworth to the Wall Street Journal.

With this program, you'll have the tools, the techniques, and, just as importantly, the unflinching confidence to influence your readers and listeners decisively - both at work and at home.

In a career that spanned decades, John Denver earned international acclaim as a singer, songwriter, actor, and environmental activist. Songs like "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Rocky Mountain High", and "Annie's Song" have entered the canon of universal anthems, but at his start John Denver was a young man with little more than a fine voice, a guitar, and a dream. Growing up in a conservative military family, he was not expected to drop out of college and head to Los Angeles, where the music scene was flourishing. Nor was he expected to succeed.

After the publication of the best-selling Letters to a Young Brother, accomplished actor and speaker Hill Harper began to receive an increasing number of moving letters from inmates who yearned for a connection with a successful role model. With disturbing statistics on African-American incarceration on his mind (one in six black men were incarcerated as of 2001, and one in three can now expect to go to prison some time in their lifetimes), Harper set out to address the specific needs of inmates.