Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 1

Where was Marcus?

I was on the tenth floor of a very grey, very shitty twenty-one-floor apartment complex in Stratford, which for the uninitiated is in East London. It was a concrete dump, but for me it was free. As I walked to the station every day to take a train into town, you would have never thought I was living in a flat with no stove or fridge. Marcus and I would joke that in England, a balcony is sufficient to keep milk cold. It’s possible that on this day there was a Gucci diamante thong peeking out from the top of my jeans, as was the (questionable) style of the day, but what’s for sure is that I looked fantastic. I’ve always known how to put myself together, even when everything else in my life is a mess.

And on this particular day, everything was a disaster.

The apartment was small—I slept on the couch in the living room, Marcus in the single bedroom—and so it didn’t take me long to deduce that he wasn’t there. And then the phone screamed through the silence. It was Marcus.

“Emma,” he said. “I’ve been arrested. You need to go on a walk. My mate is coming over to get some of my things. Until he does, Emma, don’t go home.”

“Alright, alright,” I replied, scared and thoroughly confused.

So I went for a walk. I stayed away until well after dark, and with each step I turned Marcus’s words over and over in my mind. Why was his mate going to our apartment? Why couldn’t I be there at the same time? What was his mate going to do? The more I thought, the more scared and confused I felt.

All I knew for sure was that I needed to follow Marcus’s instructions precisely. I had known him my whole life, and I trusted him like family.

Marcus ended up spending twenty-two years in jail. Only much, much later did I sort of surmise that his mate must have come by to collect some essential contraband. I didn’t want to know back then. And I still don’t. For me the main point then, and now, is simply that Marcus, on the edge of the abyss, was thinking of me, trying to keep me safe. That felt meaningful and symbolic. My future deserved his protection—and I carried from that moment onward the knowledge of his faith in me, the belief that I was destined for more and also the realization that I would need to cross a bridge from the world he and I came from to the world where I wanted to live.

Marcus could have easily told me on the phone that day that I needed to find a place of my own, but he made sure that the rent on the council flat was paid for years, as I had no money and nowhere else to go. I paid his mum twenty quid a week to stay. I was seventeen years old and working my way through fashion school—and that’s all I had to spare.

Marcus is not the only family member or family friend who went to jail when I was a kid. This was part of my reality. My extended family and family-friend circle looks like a casting call for a Guy Ritchie movie: They’re good-looking, they’re fast-talking, and they have nicknames like Bonsey and Mads. My mum, Jenny-Lee, is white and British and raised me on her own. My dad, Steve, who is Trinidadian, though born in England, is a good person and really fun, but he was completely absent during my childhood. He’s been a British telecoms engineer for his entire adult life, earning a modest income. We’re great friends now, but I could no doubt have used his steady presence in my young life.

If a fortune-teller had taken a look at my destiny when I was growing up, she would have predicted I’d become a DJ’s girlfriend or a footballer’s sidepiece, or marry a gangster. That seemed to be the predetermined path for all the women in my life, women who put everyone ahead of their own dreams and fell into rutted expectations that yielded mostly heartbreak and financial dead ends. My mum was a little different—she’d finagled a job on a trading desk, and while she encountered some hurdles in her life, she had a legitimate job at a bank for most of my childhood. My mum is very smart, though she was a tough role model at times, too.

I didn’t officially graduate from high school (I was asked to leave for being disruptive, only to learn as an adult that I’m dyslexic and struggled to keep up because they didn’t know how to teach me), and I dropped out of the London College of Fashion after my first term because I couldn’t afford to stay. I grew up in chaos, with occasional violence, and very few means.

And yet, here I am.

Nobody would have predicted that I’d launch many, many successful businesses and earn a spot on Forbes ’s “America’s Richest Self-Made Women” list by the age of forty. Nobody would have predicted that I’d be in a loving and warm marriage of sixteen years with a brilliant and supportive Swede from an artsy family. Nobody would have predicted, after a childhood where I was overly involved in raising my three younger sisters, that I’d go on to become the mother of four incredible kids who I am rightly obsessed with. Nobody would have predicted that I’d be able to therapize so much of my anger and have access to so much happiness.

I always knew though. One of the things my mother used to say to me is You’re not more special than anyone else, but nobody is more special than you . My mum had an inconsistent relationship with reality, but this felt like one of the truest things she ever said, and I integrated it deeply into my thinking. Why me? And also: Why not me? While I was a responsible and very overly parentified ten-year-old—somebody had to get my sisters to school, feed them, and show up for parent-teacher conferences because my mum couldn’t get the time off work—I recognized at an early age that it would be best for me to assume complete responsibility for myself, too. Rather than looking for people and factors to blame for why everything in my life was shaky and unstable, I decided to get on with it—and do everything differently from the people around me to create safety and security for myself.

I didn’t have any mentors until I’d already become successful, but that didn’t prevent me from paying attention: I looked for teachers everywhere, I followed my curiosity into as many books as I could get my hands on, I questioned everything, and I learned from every encounter. Nobody was going to give me any breaks, so I asked for them instead. I wedged my foot into any door that was even remotely cracked open. I pushed, I hustled, and I showed up, again and again, keeping my word and doing what I said I would do along the way.

I get a lot of questions about how I’ve done what I’ve done. People find me on shows like Shark Tank in the US and Dragons’ Den in the UK. They slide into my DMs and pull me aside at conferences or on the street. They want guidance on when, if, or how to start a family or a business—and ultimately, how to balance the two and scale. Explaining how I’ve done what I’ve done so other women can do it too was the core impetus for writing this book, along with my frustration that there’s a lot of marketing for women in business that feels frankly wrong, or like it plays into the insidious programming that keeps us all small.

People often talk about playbooks for success, and I’m here to tell you that there is no playbook, particularly for women. While it’s true that the rules of the old boys’ club still sometimes work out for men, that’s not always true either. What I’ve learned from operating, scaling, and monetizing many businesses for more than twenty years is that it’s not really about prescribed actions—do this, and do that, and get this result—it’s about the thinking that determines those actions. This is a book about mindset—about managing your emotions, clarifying your thoughts, and taking the right next step, all while holding a positive vision for your future. It’s about collecting yourself after failure, expecting no shortcuts (but taking any you can find), and pushing hard for the wins. It’s about thinking for yourself and finding your own path while learning from everyone else’s mistakes (along with your own). While a lot of people look to me for guidance on scaling billion-dollar businesses, this book isn’t just for entrepreneurs who hope to IPO someday—this book is for anyone who is tired of feeling like a passenger in their own life and wants something different for their future. That could be more ease and abundance with money, a balanced home life, or a blueprint for building a profitable side hustle that requires no financial investment.

In the following pages, I’m going to tell you about the foundational operating system that guides my life, which I learned in the streets of a very specific place: East London. I’m going to explain how I came to manage and moderate my emotions so that I didn’t use any perceived affront from the exterior world as a justification to unload my anger, sadness, fear, or guilt on other people, only setting myself back in the process. And then, one by one, I’m going to take down a series of what I call “Old Thoughts.” Women will recognize these Old Thoughts as core to the way we tend to think about the rules of life and business. These thoughts include needing to know the right people or be invited to the right events; that money is inelegant, unspiritual, scarce, and dirty; that “doing it all” is an achievable goal so long as you unlock the code to balancing your work and family life perfectly; and so many more. There are good reasons why we buy into these Old Thoughts: Our culture provides manifold evidence that they’re true and that we need to abide by them to be socially acceptable—but I haven’t. And because of this, I have a lot to show for it on the other side. My life isn’t perfect, and I still work on myself every single day, but I live the life I always dreamed of, with a family I’m so in love with, a beautiful house with two working fridges, and every day I get to do work that I enjoy.

I can hear a lot of “buts” rising in peoples’ throats: But what will people think of me? But what will I need to sacrifice to pursue my dreams? But nothing about this world is equitable or fair! I hear you. I’m not going to gaslight you. I’m not going to bathe you in toxic positivity or rain platitudes down on your head. Yes, the world is typically more difficult for women, people of color, and poor people—and yes, I am and have been all three. There are very few factors that feel ideal for mothers to succeed. I understand that men have much less pressure to be all things to all people and that nobody asked Steve Jobs or Elon Musk how they balanced their parenting while they built Apple or Tesla. Instead, we’ve largely celebrated their single-minded focus on their goals, even when they’ve come to the detriment of society. We see the quirks and faults of powerful men through our fingers. I cannot name a single woman who has been afforded the same luxury.

This is all true. And yet , we cannot wait for the world to meet our preferences in order to take action. Besides, women are exceptional. In the following pages, I’m going to remind you that your exceptionality is true and more accessible when you learn to turn down all the voices in your head suggesting you’re not doing it right and turn up your own voice instead. We are full of potential—when that potential meets grit and determination, everything is up for grabs.

And now, we need to grab it. We can’t wait for the world to decide that it’s our turn to lead and succeed. That ain’t going to happen. But we need something different. After all, when I look around at the state of women, I’m both impressed and also very disappointed. The halls of power and cap tables don’t reflect our exceptionality, nor do I meet a lot of women who feel fantastic about the balance of their lives. Far too many women feel like they are failing, or creatively stifled, or functionally blocked. All women are exhausted. While it’s very easy—and we see this all over our culture—to blame men and inequitable systems, that’s not how I roll. Not because it’s not sometimes valid, but because it’s not how change happens. Nothing is fair, it’s true. But I don’t have time to wait for equity; I’d rather make it. I take full responsibility for my life, and I create my own future, regardless of what comes back at me. If we’re going to change the world, we have to start with ourselves. We have to get on our own teams and choose ourselves first. We have everything we need. Let my life be proof that our lives are unpredictable and that you can push against expectations and come out (way) on top. I do not follow scripts. I do not abide by prevailing—and often toxic—thoughts. While there’s ample cultural proof that these thoughts are “right” or “common” or “foregone conclusions,” I see things differently and live my life accordingly. This has worked out for me quite well.

While nothing happens overnight or without a lot of hard work, you can engineer your life to match your wildest dreams. This process starts by identifying what those dreams even are, doing the work to manage your emotions, and then changing the way you think about what’s possible. While my achievements seem singular—especially in the context of where I came from—I’m pretty convinced that I’ve done what I’ve done precisely so I can teach you how to do it, too.

Let’s begin.