Stacked Against the Odds


Book Description

The story of Jesse Horn will lead families facing autism to hope: hope that those with autism are so much more than a diagnosis. They are capable of discovering life-fulfilling passions and defining for themselves what it is to live with autism.




Paths to Success


Book Description

Statisticians tell us that impoverished backgrounds are decent predictors of impoverished futures. This book seeks out the stories behind the exceptions. While the authors reveal consistencies between pathmakers' approaches and those of their middle-class counterparts, it also exposes striking differences between men and women, blacks and whites.




I Beat The Odds


Book Description

The football star made famous in the hit film (and book) The Blind Side reflects on how far he has come from the circumstances of his youth. Michael Oher shares his personal account of his story, in this inspirational New York Times bestseller. Looking back on how he went from being a homeless child in Memphis to playing in the NFL, Michael talks about the goals he had to break out of the cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that trapped his family. Eventually he grasped onto football as his ticket out and worked hard to make his dream into a reality. With his adoptive family, the Touhys, and other influential people in mind, he describes the absolute necessity of seeking out positive role models and good friends who share the same values to achieve one's dreams. Sharing untold stories of heartache, determination, courage, and love, I Beat the Odds is an incredibly rousing tale of one young man's quest to achieve the American dream.




Running Against The Odds


Book Description

Life took Desmond "Coach Dez" Dunham down an unpaved path toward both manhood and coaching, testing his spirit, humility, and purpose. Now a nationally recognized high school coach, Running Against The Odds chronicles Dunham's journey to finding his passion within youth sports, culminating at the 2007 Penn Relays - one of the most defining moments of his illustrious running career. In this impassioned coming-of-age memoir, Dunham recounts his turbulent childhood, filled with challenges in economically-distressed Gary, Indiana. Despite constant rejection and disappointment from a distant, alcoholic father, Dunham persevered, attended Howard University, and found his passion on the track with key support along the way. From humble beginnings with the odds stacked against him, Dunham's story shows that underdogs prevail.




All Bets On Me


Book Description

"ALL BETS ON ME" is a self-help book and an account of a young man who grew up in the city of New Orleans with a vision and a drive to achieve the "American Dream." The book depicts the early struggles of a kid who embodied the entrepreneurial hustle of his celebrity role models that eventually manifested into doing business with the same celebrity figures he idolized growing up. This narrative highlights the true value in building solid relationships through business and real life encounters. In pursuit of success, life will present pivotal moments that require strategic and intentional relationship building; "ALL BETS ON ME" prepares the reader to aggressively maximize those moments and translate an ordinary relationship into a lucrative one. More importantly, this publication delivers a vital message to the reader: In the game of life, every day is a gamble and even when the odds are stacked against you, roll the dice, and always make the best bet ever - bet it all on you.




The Aggregation of Marginal Gains


Book Description

For the uninitiated, the Aggregation of Marginal Gains simply states that if you decide to improve on a particular skill by as little as 1% every single day, you would be better than at least 90% of other people who have that skill. This principle was popularized by Sir Dave Brailsford who used it to convert mediocre British professional cyclists into Olympic gold medalists.In his words, here's the principle in a nutshell: "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together"In this book, I share 5 KEY SKILLS you can focus on for the Aggregation of Marginal Gains to work in your favor, instead of against you. The good thing is that these skills are not limited to any niche. You can use them in any field of endeavor you find yourself in. In addition, the total capital investment for learning and practicing these skills is zero!Are you ready? Place your order now




Stacking the Deck


Book Description

Change is a constant, and leaders must do more than keep up—they must innovate and accelerate to succeed. Yet people are often unnerved by change. As a leader during a time of transformation, you may stand up before teams that are indifferent, or even hostile, and need to convince them that change is necessary and urgent. More than money, time, or resources, the ability to lead these people determines your ultimate success or failure. What does it take to be an effective change leader and increase the odds of success? Stacking the Deck offers a proven, practical approach for inspiring meaningful, lasting change across an organization. Stacking the Deck presents a nine-step course of action leaders can follow from the first realization that change is needed through all the steps of implementation, including assembling the right team of close advisors and getting the word out to the wider group. Based on Dave Pottruck's experiences leading change as CEO of Charles Schwab and later as chairman of CorpU and HighTower Advisors, these steps provide a guide to ensure that your change initiative and your team have the best possible shot at success. In addition, established business leaders who have led extraordinary change initiatives demonstrate the steps in action. These executives include eBay CEO John Donahoe, Wells Fargo former CEO Dick Kovacevich, Starbucks chief executive officer Howard Schultz, San Francisco Giants CEO Larry Baer, JetBlue CEO Dave Barger, Asurion CEO Steve Ellis, Pinkberry CEO Ron Graves, and Intel's President Renee James, among others. Leading an organization through major change—whether it's the introduction of a new product, an expansion to a new territory, or a difficult downsizing—is not for the faint of heart. While success is never guaranteed, the right leadership, process, and team make all the difference. For all leaders facing major change in their organizations, Stacking the Deck is an indispensable resource for putting the odds in your favor.




Unfavorable Odds


Book Description

When Kim Hamilton rose to fame, she was anything but a typical world-class gymnast. She wasn't white, she didn't come from a middle-class family, and she was tall for a gymnast. But facing those obstacles was nothing compared To The challenges she faced at home. There, she tumbled in a secret world filled with drugs, violence, and financial strain. She met Unfavorable Odds but found hope by persevering through the pain. Here, Kim shares the techniques she learned to catapult herself from the past into the purpose God intended for her life.




Class Degrees


Book Description

A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization. In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a “cooling out” to a “heating up” of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from “beat the odds” of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds. Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.




WORDS


Book Description