{"id":321426,"date":"2025-10-21T15:02:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T15:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/321426\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T15:02:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T15:02:17","slug":"emma-grede-on-her-first-ever-book-ambition-and-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/321426\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Grede on Her First-Ever Book, Ambition, and Motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last thing Emma Grede wants is to bullshit you. \u201cI\u2019m allergic to toxic positivity,\u201d she tells Harper\u2019s Bazaar a day before announcing the publication of her first-ever book<\/a>. \u201cI can\u2019t bear being told bullshit. I can\u2019t bear that idea of being gaslit. And so to me, I wanted to write something that was super honest and super practical and useful, and something that people could identify themselves in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fruits of her labor would result in Start With Yourself, a business how-to for kindred enterprising spirits, slated for release through Simon and Schuster on April 14.<\/p>\n

Business books can be a crowded market, and there is certainly no shortage of writers trying to peddle off silver bullet solutions for elusive success, but few can offer the specific vantage point that Grede has. She is the modern embodiment of the word mogul. Just look at the sheer range of businesses she has under her belt: she co-founded denim brand Good American with Khlo\u00e9 Kardashian, serves as a founding partner for Kim Kardashian\u2019s culture-shifting Skims, and, in recent years, launched cleaning products line Safely and sports fan apparel line Off Season. As if that didn\u2019t keep her busy enough, she also hosts weekly episodes of the business-oriented podcast Aspire<\/a>, chairs the 15 Percent Pledge, and sits on the board of directors for nonprofit organizations like the Obama Foundation and Baby2Baby<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Born and raised by a single mother in East London, Grede points to her unflinching ambition and go-getter attitude to getting her to where she is today. \u201cI\u2019ve made no secret of the fact that I grew up with very little and I dropped out of high school. Wherever I go, I\u2019m always asked about how I\u2019ve done what I\u2019ve done,\u201d she reflects. \u201cI think people are not asking how I did it. They actually want to know for themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n

Start With Yourself may offer a blueprint for a successful life, but don\u2019t expect a black-and-white checklist. Grede isn\u2019t interested in prescribing choices. Instead, she wants readers to start with some soul-searching. \u201cSo many people say, I have this big dream, or I just want to do this, but they haven\u2019t really distilled it down into a clear vision for themselves. I think that you need to be able to articulate that and not hide behind your ambition,\u201d Grede says. \u201cI don\u2019t think that we need to go around apologizing for our ambition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Start With Yourself<\/p>\n

\"Start<\/a><\/p>\n

Learning how to be unapologetic over our own desires and aspirations is a universal lesson, but it\u2019s one that might feel especially poignant to women who have been conditioned to feel guilty if they can\u2019t do it all on their own. Grede, who herself is a mother of four<\/a>, wants her readers to know that her success doesn\u2019t sit solely on her own shoulders.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have an unbelievable amount of help,\u201d she says. \u201cWe were never supposed to raise kids all alone. When I was a kid, you had a neighbor that looked after you and some auntie that pitched in. It was a communal thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pushing against antiquated ideas of child-rearing and gender roles allows Grede to unabashedly model other ways of being\u2014a hard worker, an industry leader, and a dream chaser\u2014to her own daughter. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the conditioning in the culture tells us that you have to do things a certain way. We should be up. We should be making these insane lunches and cut our kids\u2019 sandwiches into heart shapes,\u201d she says. At the end of the day, she wants her readers to define success on their own terms, even if that means curating lunchbox sandwiches. \u201cIf that\u2019s important to you, fine, but let\u2019s make sure that what you are doing and what you\u2019re killing yourself over, they\u2019re the things that matter to you. I just think that I want women to get really, really clear about what it is that they care about deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Start With Yourself\u2019s philosophy is to cut out the outside noise and start living life for no one else but you. It\u2019s simple, great advice for business\u2014and life in general. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so funny because I started out and I was like, This is going to be a straight business book. And then as I started writing it, I was like, No, this is a vision for work and for life because you can\u2019t have one without the other,\u201d says Grede. \u201cIf I looked at this book now, I\u2019d be so happy. To me, it\u2019s very, very truthful and very, very useful. And that\u2019s really what I wanted to write.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last thing Emma Grede wants is to bullshit you. \u201cI\u2019m allergic to toxic positivity,\u201d she tells Harper\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":321427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,3178,160860,1201,171,2875,160858,160859,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-321426","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-content-type-news","10":"tag-contentid-5f6f3b36-c9e1-442c-bc46-c20eed014d9e","11":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-locale-us","14":"tag-shorttitle-emma-grede-announces-her-first-book","15":"tag-start-with-yourself","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115412766112595735","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}