Kat Cole was eighteen, working three jobs, when a Hooters manager told her she needed to be bigger. Years later, as president of Cinnabon, the one time speaking up actually mattered, she stayed quiet instead.

John Paul DeJoria came home one evening at twenty-two to find his wife gone, the car gone, and their two-year-old son alone in the living room with a note. It wasn't the last time he'd end up with nothing.

Sara Blakely wanted to be a trial lawyer for as long as she could remember. She bombed the LSAT twice, got turned down for a Disney costume for being two inches too short, and spent the next seven years selling fax machines door to door before a ruined pair of pantyhose changed everything.

Jing Gao learned to make dumplings from her grandmother years before Fly By Jing existed. When the company's own dumpling line sold out three times over, she ended it anyway, at the height of its success.

Bennett Maxwell was selling solar in San Diego when a friend from high school called him about a cookie shop he was too worn out to keep running. What Maxwell found before he ever fixed the business was a mission statement small enough to be honest: to find joy and fulfillment.

I was somewhere around seven years old the first time a story made me feel something I hadn't felt before. It followed me from that day on. Into my personal and professional life.