Book Excerpts

Read excerpts from the book by clicking on a title or an author image. Click a name to read more about that author.

	Betty Jo Waxman Mindset, Baby, Mindset! Want to start your own business? You could read one (or many) of the hundreds of books out there on the subject, make all the right moves, and do it just the way the experts tell you to.		Carole Amos Disappearing the Wall of No Have you ever noticed that chasing your dreams just makes them retreat? Sometimes stalking them creates the opposite of the result we’re seeking. But, just like that proverbial butterfly, happiness will frequently land on your shoulder while you’re otherwise occupied.
	Eldette Davie What Was I Thinking? I live in Africa, but not in a mud hut as many people unfamiliar with Africa might imagine. I don’t have elephants or lions running around my garden. We have electricity and inflation, drive cars in traffic jams, and pay exorbitant amounts for petrol (gas, as you might call it elsewhere).		Hannah Kain My Friend’s Car, the Ladies Room, and Other Career-Boosting Places “The FBI is on the line,” said the receptionist one morning, as I stepped into the company. “They need to talk to you.” Now, even though I am not a morning person, that greeting will get anybody’s mind kicked into high gear.
	Julie Castro Abrams /you-are-if-you-say-you-are I grew up in Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I had much of the small town naïveté, but as an athlete, I also had a great drive and confidence. The combination led me to think I could do anything. So when I was too young to know anything, and too naïve to be scared, I started a business. I was 22 years old.		Scrappy Kimberly Wiefling The Making of Scrappy Women in Biz Late one night when there was nothing good on TV I got this idea to collect the stories of some of the scrappiest businesswomen I know and admire into a book. “How hard could that be?” I thought. Well, buddy, let me tell you, there’s nothing easy about getting 12 vibrant, strong-willed women to agree on anything!
	Mai-Huong Le This Is Your Life – Go For It! When you were growing up, how many times did someone tell you to “Keep your eye on the ball”? I have heard it about 500,000 times … not that I’ve been keeping track. Rounding off to the nearest hundred thousand, let’s just say too many times … from my teachers, coaches and teammates.		Nathalie Udo Don’t Sweat the Downtime – Celebrate! Coming to the USA from Europe—the Netherlands specifically—it was a no brainer for me to start my own business in my new home country.
	Pat Obuchowski “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” As a young girl, I would always cringe when this question was asked of me. The problem was I never really knew if I wanted to grow up or not! Of course, I had no choice in the matter of growing up. It was going to happen. But I did have a choice in what I wanted to be.		Sue Lebeck Grace and the Artful Professional My professional story has taken me from one extreme to the other—from an uber-left-brain career to an uber-right-brain one—and back again to center. Looking back, I see that my whole brain has been at work all along, bringing first a human emotionality to the computer world, and later a software engineer’s logic to the emotional world.
	Terrie Mui Riding the Wave Did you know that if you grow up in Switzerland you have to choose your profession while you’re in high school? Only about 20% of the population continues on to the university level, and the remainder attends vocational school. If you want to change later, it’s almost impossible—not because you don’t have the potential or desire, but because change is slow in a country that has been around for a long, long, long time.		Yuko Shibata The Unstoppable Power of Persistence Although I’ve lived all my life in Japan, where society’s expectations and treatment of women differ greatly from those of men, I’ve lived anything but a traditional Japanese woman’s life. As a young girl growing up in a small town a long train ride from the center of Tokyo, I embraced two opposing dreams.

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