I finished Emma Grede’s book, “Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work and Life” over the weekend, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I knew probably 10 pages in that I would be recording a podcast episode with an Emma Grede Book Review. I love talking about the nonfiction books I read, and before reading it, I have to be honest — I did expect to love it.
I love Emma Grede’s podcast. I am not super into fashion, if that’s okay to say, so I was a bit unfamiliar with her existence until she showed up on the Diary of a CEO podcast. And she caused quite a stir after that. I’m not a regular listener of Diary of a CEO either, but I remember seeing on Threads: absolutely loved this episode, absolutely hated this episode.
It was so divisive that I had to find out what the fuss was about.
I found her so captivating in that interview — so brutally honest. Maybe not brutal, maybe that’s the wrong word, but so direct. It was so refreshing. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything she says, I can also say that I don’t want to build multiple billion-dollar companies. So it’s not that I think what she’s saying is wrong — it’s just that not every single thing she says is right for me.
But regardless, the radicalness of how direct she is, and how she blends some of the advice we typically hear for women with what she sees working in bigger businesses… I was gripping onto every single word. I have both the audiobook version and the physical version because I knew I would be highlighting and taking notes, and I did.
Online, it’s so easy to get into the habit of either idolizing successful people or dismissing them because we don’t want their exact life, or because they said something like “I only want to be a three-hour mom” — which we are absolutely going to talk about.
But I really loved every single minute of this book and I can’t wait to share some of my biggest takeaways.
Table of Contents
How Emma Grede’s Book Is Structured
One of the reasons I could not put the book down was that she jumps immediately into a story from her life prior to being a billionaire — or multimillionaire, whatever she is — and it literally felt like I was reading fiction. The book caught me off guard immediately, and then it moved into overall vision before strategy.
That wasn’t something I necessarily expected, but leading with vision and deciding what your version of success looks like seems to be something a lot of people are talking about lately. Still, I really appreciated her perspective of unapologetically starting with yourself.
I don’t know her Enneagram, but I feel like she might be an Eight — someone who just challenges these things head-on. One of the things she says really early in the book is that some of us are looking for a boss even when one doesn’t exist. I was clutching my pearls, because that is sometimes me. I’m always looking ahead, looking toward a business coach, chatting with a friend, trying to police myself — trying to be the good girl, do the things, be impressive, have my clients like me. People-pleasing, all of these habits I’ve honestly had since I was a kid.
Then you get into entrepreneurship and there’s no one telling you what to do all the time.
I always laugh because there are some entrepreneurs who became entrepreneurs because they would have never survived in the corporate world. I do not think that’s me. I think I would have thrived. I think I would have loved climbing the corporate ladder.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m totally grateful for my entrepreneur life, and I love channeling my ambition into my business, but I’m a rule follower. I would have been fine in a corporate situation. So that line about looking for a boss even when one doesn’t exist hit me immediately.
Part One: Vision and Thinking Bigger
I also really loved the vision section of the book, where she talks about how maybe you don’t want to build a billion-dollar business, but maybe you can think a little bigger than where you currently are. She talks about how her vision of what she wants has continually expanded, and I feel like I can relate to that on a much smaller scale.
She mentions that all she wanted, at one point, was to be able to fly anywhere in the world in whatever class seat she wanted — something like that. And that is already bigger than what I sometimes think my biggest goals are. But the point is that once she could do that, she added other things she wanted.
I have always struggled with setting a super big vision. I’m more of a nitty-gritty, what-do-the-next-three-months-look-like kind of person. And when I do try to look at the big vision, I always want to do it all right now.
So right off the bat, this book was an invitation to think bigger — whether bigger means more money, more freedom, more impact, or something else entirely. It’s not necessarily groundbreaking for a business book to open with vision, although I did love the way she approached it.
That’s just the first 10 pages. ‘s already online, then sure, AI does that cheaper and faster, and blogging will be a waste of your time.
Part Two: Emotional Regulation as a Business Skill
She then moves on to emotional regulation and how emotion plays into our businesses. I am of the belief that emotional regulation is one of the most important business skills. She spends a lot of time talking about emotions — specifically anger, fear, joy, sadness, and guilt — and how all of these things have shaped part of her life. The core message is that if you leave these emotions unchecked, they will catch up with you.
As somebody who has been in business for a long time now, over nine years, I really loved this section because one of the things I’ve found the longer I’m in business is that the first half of my business was learning hard skills. I started my entrepreneurship journey learning all about destination weddings, travel, weddings. Then COVID hit, I pivoted, and I was learning SEO, blogging, Pinterest — learning how to market it as a service.
There’s no way to grow a business without some personal development, but I’ve found that in the second half of business ownership, that is the most important thing I’m learning.
I am on a (sometimes rough) personal development journey where I’m just more aware of myself than I’ve ever been. I know how to regulate my emotions so much better. An angry email doesn’t ruin my week. I can calm myself down when someone’s upset with me, and if somebody is upset about something else, I know how to not take it personally.
These soft skills are what I’m constantly learning in the second half of my business, and they’re what’s making me a stronger entrepreneur without a doubt. Think about it — this works itself into every aspect of your business: difficult clients, raising prices, hiring, firing, launches, criticism, slow seasons, comparison, uncertainty. You need to keep yourself in check, or you could easily burn a successful business into the ground.
The longer I’ve been a business owner — and I’m sure every single person reading this is going to understand what I’m saying — you start to really see the people in your life who are not business owners, who are not going through the same journey, who are not valuing self-improvement, personal development, radical responsibility, and accountability.
These are things the world does not necessarily force you into the way business ownership does. You’re forced to learn these lessons a lot faster.
I feel like the gap is widening in my own life, and I want to be clear — not every person who doesn’t own a business lacks these skills, and I’m certainly not saying that. However, there have been so many moments for me to grow as a person because of my business that sometimes it’s very obvious to me when people have not had those same moments.
On Trade-Offs and the Cost of an Exceptional Life
It was in this emotions chapter that I also found myself thinking we don’t need to agree on every single thing for me to learn from Emma Grede.
For example, she talks about how if things are too good, she believes she’s not pushing herself enough. I liked that, but I also didn’t like it for my own life. She talks about how she considers it a good balance if she spends a third of her life happy, a third neutral, and a third unhappy, framing these as the sacrifices and trade-offs — as she calls them — required to get to an exceptional life. I love that for her. But I don’t know if I want to make that trade-off. I don’t know if I want to fly in first class that badly.
Right now I feel like I’m happy about 80% of the time, neutral 18% of the time, and unhappy 2% of the time. Maybe I’m being delusional, but that is how I feel, and I don’t necessarily want to change that to have a more exceptional life.
To build billion-dollar companies, it makes sense that you literally always need to be pushing, always taking risk without being reckless, constantly pushing yourself. But that doesn’t necessarily need to be the right way for every single entrepreneur.
That said, I have to say how much respect I have for her for saying it, because I am so tired of the BS advice we hear as women. I’m tired of people pretending everything is easy, that it’s a soft life, that the work is easy, that things just fall into place. I am so glad this book wasn’t sugarcoated. What she is saying is that this is what may be required to get to the next level, and I can then decide whether I want that, whether I’m willing to make that trade-off.
Part Three: Old Thoughts vs. New Thoughts
Part three, which makes up about 80% of the book, is all about old thoughts versus new thoughts. She’ll present a piece of advice you’ve heard before as an “old thought,” and then offer the “new thought” — how her life has played out, the things she believes got her to where she is.
It’s broken into categories: trade-offs you’ll make in life, money, career, family, building a brand and a business, and leadership. All of it is excellent, with so many examples. The audiobook is about 10 hours, and I could honestly talk about this book for 10 hours — but I’m going to focus on some of my favorite themes that I think we can all apply to our own lives.
Grit, Resilience, and Making Your Own Luck
The first is the idea of grit and resilience. If I had to summarize Emma Grede in two words, it would be resilient and gritty. She doesn’t come across as particularly lucky in this book.
Some of the negative criticism — and of course there’s negative criticism, there always is when it comes to women — is that she married well, or that she was luckily connected to a Kardashian.
But one of my favorite ideas I keep coming back to is this: if you want to be lucky, increase the radius where luck can find you (that didn’t come from the book but I think I saw it on TIkTok). Go to as many things, talk to as many people, increase your surface area on this planet for luck to hit you. Emma Grede doesn’t sound lucky in this book. She sounds relentless. It sounds like she worked for every single thing that happened to her.
Her Values Are Clear In Every Chapter
Another thing I really loved is that her values — whether these are your values or not — are oozing from every single page. You feel them constantly. Jotting things down as I went, you can tell she values honesty, teamwork, hiring experts, excellence, curiosity, hard work, resilience, self-awareness, being obsessed with your customer, and personal responsibility.
She clearly cares about women and wants to help them succeed.
She will acknowledge certain privileges and certain disadvantages, and she is the complete opposite of a victim mindset. Sometimes she glosses over some of the real hardships she herself must have faced, but especially listening to the audiobook, you know that she believes every word she’s written, and it is so consistent throughout. She talks about her whole career — she’s in her mid-40s and started working at 15, so a 30-year career — and you can feel how consistent her values have been the entire time. I just love that.
Being Obsessed With Your Customer
One of the values I want to highlight is this idea of being absolutely obsessed with your customer, because it’s personally one of my favorite themes.
There was one story specifically in the book that I loved, where she was talking about launching Good American. Of course she thought it would do well, but it surpassed their expectations. And because of her inexperience in that specific part of the industry, there was going to be a delay in the jeans. So she — as co-founder, forgive me on the exact title — was personally calling customers. The amount she learned from those conversations, and how those early customers became the brand’s biggest advocates simply because she took the time to call them, was so inspiring to me.
One of the things I jotted down was: she doesn’t hide from her customer problems. She runs toward them.
It’s easy to think that somebody with multiple billion-dollar brands under her belt would care more about margins — not that she doesn’t care about those things, or scaling, or team — but she is so customer-focused the whole time. How do we make things that solve our customers’ problems?
Using Good American as an example again: the idea for the brand, or at least what solidified it, came from a dinner party where someone was showing her plus-sized websites. Her reaction was, “Oh my God, I wouldn’t wear any of this. These are the only options that plus-sized women have to choose from. This is a real problem.”
So she went to the drawing board — what do women actually want? Good American, if you don’t know, makes every single thing in every single size. They can make the tiniest bikini and they’re making it in every single size, with a huge size range.
The philosophy is: let people decide what they want to wear. We’re not going to decide for them as a clothing company.
She solved a real problem, was heavily rewarded for it, and Good American is now a huge business. She saw the opportunity, went for it, and followed through.
As her customers’ biggest advocate, she also required that every store carrying Good American carry the whole size range, and that all sizes be displayed together — so that people shopping in plus sizes could shop in the same section and find the same clothes. That was simply a requirement if you wanted to carry the brand. She built a lot of loyalty that way by going to bat for her customers, by saying, “This is a problem. We’re solving it. We’re solving it all the way.”
Having a Deep Respect For Her Customer’s hard Earned Money
When it comes to being customer-obsessed, she also has a deep respect for people’s hard-earned money, which stood out to me because she’s a multi-multimillionaire, and yet she spoke about her customers’ finances with such consideration.
She talks about knowing the price of everything — which is almost funny, because wasn’t there a moment where Kim Kardashian didn’t know the price of milk on a podcast? That was a thing.
So the fact that Emma Grede, who works closely with two Kardashian brands, is out here saying, “I know the cost of every single thing” — that’s striking. She says if she wants to move a belt loop over half an inch, she knows what that costs. And it’s not just her products; she knows what the average person is paying for heat and electricity in their home.
She’s constantly thinking about value, thinking about whether people are going to spend money on this, whether it solves enough of a problem that someone would choose it over what a competitor is offering.
She’s Watching Her Competitors
She also talks about watching her competitors, which everyone says is so controversial, and her take is simply: you have to know what your customers are looking at. I could talk about this forever, but it comes down to customers being at the center of everything. As business owners, we can get so distracted and so out of touch with what our customers are actually going through — especially the longer we do it — and this was just so refreshing for me.
Hiring Experts and Letting Go of Ego
The other huge lesson I took away from the book was how she can be both completely locked into the work — not detached from it at all — and still not be a micromanager. She may not actually use that word, but she talks about how even running huge companies, she knows exactly what’s happening. She knows the product, the marketing, the branding, the operations, the customers. She’s very involved.
And because she has this standard of excellence that bleeds through every single thing she touches, having that high standard is incredibly important — and hard to maintain unless you’re fully locked in.
At the same time, she talks about the importance of hiring experts, hiring people who are really, really great at what they do, and then trusting them to do their job. She doesn’t necessarily need to know everything about everything, and she doesn’t need to be the hero who jumps in to save everything.
There’s one thing that my first excellent business coach, Candice Coppola — shout out to her, she’s the best; if you’re in the wedding industry, check her out — said to me that has always stuck with me. I was having a confrontation with someone who worked for me, and she asked, “Can I be honest?” I said of course, and she said, “I feel like your ego might be getting in the way. Do you actually care that they did X, Y, Z? Or do you care that it’s not your way?”
I was so grateful to be checked like that. She recommended I read *Ego Is the Enemy* by Ryan Holiday, which is a book everyone should read.
And that’s, I guess, in the same vein as what I got from Emma. It does not feel like she leads with ego at all. She’s very happy to hire experts and trust them to do what they need to do. Even though she’s the magical founder who has built billion-dollar brands and everything she touches is remarkable, it doesn’t feel like she rests on her laurels or needs that to be acknowledged. She talks about how her superpower is bringing incredible people together, being able to see the nitty-gritty, and connecting the dots between them.
She doesn’t need to be the star. She doesn’t need to be the face. In fact, she talks about how she would have been fine never being the face at all. Founder-forward or founder-centered marketing is very prominent now, and she feels like she’s moving into a new stage in her career where she’ll be taking on more of a personal brand, helping women excel in their careers in this next season rather than starting another product brand. So she’s coming out from behind the scenes — but she was genuinely happy being behind the scenes.
That’s something I’ve always related to. I’ve always been okay being really great behind the scenes. I am ambitious. I do want to do great things. I’m just a hundred percent happy to not be the face of every single thing that I do.
Your Life Has Seasons and Your Career Is Long
Transitioning from that point, one of my other favorite themes of the book is that life has seasons. I’ve touched on this before, and Elizabeth McCravy talks about this on her podcast — how sometimes we feel like we’re in a rush, or that things are slipping, and we have to jump on every opportunity. But it’s a good reminder that your career is long. Your life changes. You are going to have seasons of hustle and sacrifice and long hours, and then maybe seasons where you can take your foot off the gas pedal.
One of the things I found so interesting is that she talks about how sometimes your season of hustle might need to last 10 years. Read the book — don’t quote me on every single thing I’m saying here. But what I interpreted, anyway, is: give it a minute, and know that 10 years is nothing. I agree with that.
I was thinking about how a lot of times people in the online space burn out after five. Why do we burn out faster as business owners, or being in the online space? I’m biased, because I only know my own experience, but I feel like maybe we’re burning out faster because we’re selling ourselves — versus, say, Emma selling jeans or selling Skims or whatever it is. It is so different selling yourself, and it can feel like a different level of exhaustion.
The point is, I loved that she was being realistic. She is not going to tell you there’s a “you don’t need to hustle” kind of attitude that got her where she is, because she doesn’t believe that. So whether that’s fact or fiction or simply her own beliefs, she’s not going to tell you it because she doesn’t think it’s true.
Conversations More Women Need To Be Having
She does believe it requires a period of hustle, and that that period could be 10 years. While also acknowledging that for women, sometimes these are our childbearing years — and that is something you need to think about.
She doesn’t shy away from that conversation. She talks about how it does a disservice to women to tell them to push through in their 20s and 30s, and then all of a sudden they’re 40 and they realize it might be harder to access that part of their life. I keep saying this, but I just felt like this book was so powerful because Emma was talking about some of the advice we simply do not hear as women. And when we do hear it, it’s almost buried under apologies, or caveats, or it’s sugarcoated. I really, really appreciated that.
And speaking of conversations more women need to be having, there was also a lot about money.
Something that just came to mind that I don’t even have in my notes: there were so many times she said things about money where I thought, “I feel like I’m pretty open talking about money with my friends” — and yet she described certain scenarios where you’re like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. We do handle that differently.”
As one example, she talks about how if somebody asks her to connect two people, she should be cut in. There’s value in those relationships, and men do it all the time. Men will say, “Oh, you want to start something? I could connect you to my buddy, but I want in too.” And we just don’t think like that. We think, “Oh no, I must make those connections because I’m a nice girl. I’m a nice woman.”
Can you imagine if someone asked you for a connection, and you wanted to be in on what came out of it — wanted a percentage of the idea or something? It’s not always as cut and dry as that, and she goes into obviously more detail in the book, but there were certain situations where you just think, “Oh yeah, this is different from what we’re told.”
That’s why I really liked the last section of the book where she talks about old thoughts and new thoughts — we keep being told one thing, and this is what’s actually true, or at least true for her. And as I mentioned, there are around 10 per chapter, so there’s plenty to choose from. I could see myself, if I’m being honest, reading this book once a year, maybe once every two years, and getting something different out of it every single time.
On the “Three-Hour Mom” Conversation
At the end of my notes, I talk about how when this book came out, the conversation was all about how she’s a “three-hour mom” and how hard she works. The mom stuff I also found so interesting. It didn’t wrap up into a neat little bow, but there was this unapologeticness about the decisions she’s made — decisions she has to live with, that she believes in. She believes she’s doing what is right by her kids and right for her.
I really loved so much of what she said about her approach to motherhood, the guilt we feel, and what society expects of us versus what children actually need. You’re going to have to read the book, because it won’t sound the same coming from me.
The Biggest Thing To Take Away From This Emma Grede Book Review
The takeaway isn’t that you need to read this book and copy exactly what Emma does.
At the same time, you can’t read this book and conclude that she got lucky, or that she married into her connections, or that she has work-life balance. Reading the entire book gives you a much fuller picture, and I highly, highly recommend every woman read it.
She says so many things that surprised me — and this is coming from someone who was already an Emma Grede fan. Whether you want to build multi-billion dollar businesses or not, there is so much to take from this book, and these were just a few of my favorites.
If this conversation resonated with you, I’d love for you to keep it going. Come find me and let me know what you thought — and if you haven’t picked up Start With Yourself yet, consider this your sign to grab a copy.
LINKS MENTIONED
- Emma Grede’s book, “Start With Yourself
- Other book reviews: 10X is Easier Than 2X, Time Anxiety
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