Our next Book Club selection is Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede, moderated by co-lab member Abbey Samet.
Start With Yourself is a game-changing, no-BS guide for anyone seeking meaningful success on their own terms. It’s an essential framework that will give you the tools and mindset to unlock your full potential in life and business—straight from a woman who defied all the odds to become a serial entrepreneur, a cofounder of culture-defining global businesses, a nonprofit champion, and the host of the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast. All while raising a family of four children.
Based on the factors of her early life—she’s the child of a working-class single mother and grew up in a rough neighborhood in East London and dropped out of high school—you’d never guess that Emma Grede would go on to become one of America’s richest self-made women.
This makes Grede unique, but she’s convinced you can do it, too: Start With Yourself is a blueprint to her mindset and how she thinks about business and life, structured in easy takeaways, so you can immediately apply her philosophy to what you’re trying to build and create.
Among her most blazing insights, Grede identifies what she calls “Old Thoughts”: stale thinking, outdated ideas; set-in-stone rules ingrained into the culture about work-life balance, the crassness of money, and the unseemliness of ambition—that aren’t actually rules at all. They’re biases, Grede insists, system errors, and we must strike them from our minds so that we can gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals.
Ultimately, this is a book for everyone tired of feeling like a bystander or passenger in their own life. Grede offers tangible and applicable-right-now solutions to create a mindset, an overall system of thought to manage emotions, clarify ideas, and illuminate the right next step—while always staying positive.
It’s about gathering yourself after failure. It’s about being accountable but also forgiving yourself. It’s about not expecting shortcuts while never being bashful about grabbing them when they appear. It’s about pushing hard for wins and never apologizing for your dreams.
Above all, Grede offers a new vision for work and life that encourages readers everywhere to take responsibility for their own thinking in order to achieve personal and professional success at the highest levels.
Abbey Samet is a New York City–based merchandising strategist and product leader known for translating cultural insight into compelling products and retail experiences. With leadership roles at Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Kenneth Cole, Lacoste, and venture-backed lifestyle brand Solid & Striped, she brings a unique ability to connect trend forecasting, merchandising strategy, and brand storytelling to drive growth across global brands.
At Macy’s, Abbey founded and led the company’s Global Trend Forecasting division, shaping seasonal product strategies that influenced more than $16B in annual sales across private brands and national assortments. Her work bridges creative vision with commercial execution—developing product assortments, retail concepts, and partnerships that connect culture, consumer insight, and commerce.
Abbey approaches brand building holistically, combining product strategy, experiential retail thinking, and forecasting expertise to help brands scale, evolve, and resonate with modern consumers.
Café Co-Lab's are small, weekly networking groups focused on specific topics. They are an opportunity for co-lab members to connect, share resources , and engage with other members.
All co-lab events are free to members. Zoom details will be posted on the day of the event in our private community Slack in the #cafe-co-lab channel. All questions can be directed to info@jointhecolab.com. To become a member and receive access to these exciting events, join us here.