Herrin - Find your extraordinary: how to dream bigger, live better and achieve success on your own terms

Jessica Herrin

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FIND YOUR EXTRAORDINARY

Dream Bigger, Live Happier and Achieve Success on Your Own Terms

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Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in the United States of America by Crown Business 2016
First published in the United Kingdom by Portfolio Penguin 2016

Copyright Jessica Herrin, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photograph: Brook Todd

Photograph by Lisa Romerein

Illustrations by nakorn/Shutterstock.com

ISBN: 978-0-241-25093-8

Jessica Herrin is CEO/founder of Stella & Dot Family Brands. She has been featured on Oprah, Today, Undercover Boss and in Fortune and the Wall Street Journal, and was included on Inc.s list of top ten female CEOs in 2012. Stella & Dot Family Brands (Stella & Dot, KEEP Collective, and EVER Skincare) consists of more than 50,000 business owners in six countries who have earned over $300 million from running their own flexible businesses, sharing over $1 billion in product sales since 2007. Their celebrity-coveted and award-winning products have been featured in InStyle, Vogue, Allure, Elle and Real Simple.

To my father, Larry, for the love that fueled my confidence. All of the good in me is you.

To my husband, Chad, for the love that filled the holes in my heart. You are my place in this world.

To my daughters, Charlotte and Tatum, for the unbreakable love of all lovesthe happiness explosion that is motherhood. You are my heart.

To the tribe of women that I call friends. Without your extraordinary love and support, I could only be ordinary.

This book brims with extraordinary beauty, passion, wisdom and practical application. Jessica is one of the most inspiring leaders I have ever known. What makes Jessica such a compelling guide is that she teaches what she has brilliantly practised and proven in action. She first found the extraordinary in herself against great odds, before helping countless others do the same Shirzad Chamine, New York Times bestselling author of Positive Intelligence

Its clear Jessica Herrin has found her extraordinary and is living proof that a woman can and should dream bigger, live happier and achieve success on her own terms. I am so inspired by Jessica and the advice she offers in this book Christy Turlington Burns, founder, Every Mother Counts

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

CECIL BEATON

What if I told you that, with a little effort, you could live an extraordinary life? A life in which you felt deep passion for what you did and you always had time for what mattered to you? A life in which you made your most important dreams come true, all while happily leaving behind feelings of inadequacy or guilt, discarding them as if they were corsets from the 19th century?

These days theres a lot of discussion about whether women can have it all. This book isnt about having it all; its about having what matters mostto you. This is a book about achieving your boldest dreams and ambitions, but doing it on your terms. I wrote this book to help you find your own version of extraordinaryto help you dial up the sound of your own voice so you can tune in to your authentic dreams and develop the will to make them reality.

Now, lets just get this out there its a tad presumptuous of me to tell other people how to be successful, isnt it? Doesnt it mean I think Im successful enough to be an expert in the matter? Well, I do consider myself successful, but not for the reasons you might think at first glance.

Ive done a lot that I am proud of. I graduated from Stanford, and Ive been on the cover of the New York Times, called out for being a serial entrepreneur and founder of two successful companies: Della & James, which became WeddingChannel.com, and the company I currently run, the Stella & Dot Family of Brands. And Ive had some amazing life experiencesI have been on Oprah, Ive gone to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen of England, Ive been in the Wall Street Journal, and Ive had my face broadcast eight stories high in Times Square after ringing the closing bell at NASDAQ for the Stella & Dot Foundation. (That was fun!)

Did sheer luck have something to do with my success? Yes. I was born in the United States, where education is widely available to both genders. I graduated from college in 1994, right around the time women in the United States began earning college degrees in equal numbers with men. Ohand lest I forgetI went to college in the heart of Silicon Valley right before the commercialization of the Internet and right after the economy recovered from a recession.

Since I sought my first job when the economy was strong, it was easier to take risks, knowing I could always go back and get a safe job. The way society looked at work was changing too. There was a decided shift away from looking at a twenty-five-year tenure at one company and a gold watch at retirement as the pinnacle of success to seeing dropouts and innovators as business heroes.

I was also born into a time when women could play more than menial roles in the workforce. Though our ancestors were around for about six million years, modern humans evolved only about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in earnest only in the 1800s. The 20th century saw the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Vietnam and Korea wars; with all that hardship, women finally began to enter the workforce. (Remember Rosie the Riveter?) But only with the feminist movement of the 1960s did women begin to enter the professional world in great numbersand weve been gunning to break the glass ceilings ever since.