Alex Sterling

By thirty, I'd been fired once, gone broke twice, and started three businesses — two of which don't exist anymore. I've slept in a van I chose to live in, and once in an airport I wasn't supposed to be sleeping in. I've pitched investors at nine in the morning and eaten instant noodles alone that same night because it didn't land.

I didn't write my first book because I had life figured out. I wrote it because I'd failed at enough different things — money, relationships, the version of success I used to chase — that the pattern underneath all of it finally showed itself. Fixing a bad business, it turns out, isn't so different from fixing a bad morning, or a bad year.

So when I write about money, focus, or starting over, it's not theory. It's what actually cost me something to learn — for the person still in the middle of their own mess, not the tidy story that comes after.