If you’re planning to start a business, The Unfair Advantage is the guidebook you need to achieve success. Entrepreneurs Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba tell you how to realize your entrepreneurial dreams by finding and using your unfair advantages, the qualities or conditions that give you an edge over competitors. Ali and Kubba explain that everyone has unfair advantages, and you need to use yours if you want to succeed in the ruthless domain of startups.

Drawing on over 20 years of experience building startups and coaching entrepreneurs, Ali and Kubba describe the mindset you must adopt and the steps you must take to achieve startup success—from identifying a viable business idea to building a winning team. In this guide, we’ll examine Ali and Kubba’s tips for finding and applying your unfair advantages. We’ll also compare the authors’ ideas to those of other business leaders—for instance, ideas from Brian Tracy in Goals! and Grant Cardone in The 10X Rule—and share additional steps you can take to achieve startup success.

In Positioning, advertising consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout explore the concept of positioning—a strategy of framing your product, service, company, or self against your competitors and within your market. They examine not only how you can use positioning for your organization, but also how you can use it to achieve your personal career goals.

In this guide, we’ll look at what Ries and Trout mean by "positioning," compare it to how others have defined the concept, and explore strategies and techniques you can use in a positioning campaign. We’ll also touch on a few positioning strategies that Ries and Trout caution against. Throughout, we’ll discuss ways that other marketing professionals have interpreted the strategy that expand on and amplify Ries and Trout’s insights.

Zero to One is entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s unconventional advice for technology startups. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, argues that technology has stagnated. Most new companies improve incrementally on existing products, but Thiel argues that the most valuable and game-changing startups create something new. They move the world from zero to one. Creating new things is not only the best path to profits—it’s also the only path for human progress. In this guide, we’ll compare Thiel’s perspective with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Geoffrey Moore’s strategy for high-tech startups, and the insights of other innovation experts.

Business Model Generation, a contemporary guide to systematic business innovation, provides a template for brainstorming and visualizing the overarching elements that make up a successful, holistic business model.

The authors analyze the different ways you can combine these elements to create the most successful business model patterns. In addition, they provide techniques you can use to generate your own innovative business models, as well as strategies you can incorporate to regularly analyze and optimize your existing business models.

This guide supplements each key concept and strategy with up-to-date examples and commentary, and we suggest complementary processes to effectively incorporate their concepts into your own business models.

If you’re looking to break away from your current work arrangement and start doing something that you’re passionate about, consider starting your own microbusiness, a business run by one person. Where you once needed to have a fair amount of funding to get started, Chris Guillebeau suggests you can now do so for as little as $100.

In The $100 Startup, Guillebeau breaks down the process of starting your own business. He covers everything from finding your target audience to creating a development plan, explaining how you can find success without loaning a cent from the bank.

Maid is Stephanie Land’s memoir of her struggle to make ends meet as a single mom by working as a housekeeper and relying on government assistance. Since Maid was published, it has been adapted into a popular, critically acclaimed Netflix miniseries.

Beyond being a personal narrative, Maid is also a broader social commentary on the American "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. Land does backbreaking labor under difficult conditions while caring for her daughter and studying to get a college degree—yet circumstances beyond her control keep her mired in poverty. From domestic abuse to flawed government policies, the obstacles that Land must overcome are overwhelming. By the end of the memoir, while she hasn’t yet fully escaped her situation, she has begun to make a better life for herself and her daughter.

Our guide provides background information, research, and statistics on the key themes, bringing context to Land’s personal experience as it relates to the larger population of Americans experiencing poverty and abuse.

Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian. Westover gains the strength to break free from the ideological chains of her youth and discovers the agency to make her own choices about how she sees and experiences the world.

While it is about one individual’s journey, Educated speaks to universal themes of self-liberation, the power of education, the perils of extreme ideology, and the trauma of domestic abuse.

The Glass Castle is the harrowing tale of Jeannette Wall’s life growing up in poverty with wayward parents. Jeannette and her siblings were often left to fend for themselves as their parents engaged in alcoholic binges or flights of fancy. The siblings ultimately resented their parents’ neglect and became independent, moving far away.

Following the Walls family through the desert to the coal-mining region of West Virginia to the fast-paced life of New York City, this memoir explores the nature of family, loyalty, and tragedy and what it takes to survive together and apart.

At the age of 24, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan is stricken with a terrible disease. In a matter of weeks, it morphs from paranoia into hallucinations, seizures, and psychosis. It resists diagnosis even by the most prestigious doctors in the US. Only when Susannah becomes catatonic, staring death in the face, do two brilliant neurologists discover the problem: Susannah is suffering from an autoimmune disease that’s causing her antibodies to attack her own brain.

Cahalan’s harrowing portrait shows how frail disease makes us, ready to accept any diagnosis, even when we know it’s wrong; how the US healthcare system serves some patients better than others; and how maintaining a positive attitude is critical to recovery.

Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race tells the story of a group of African-American women who, over a period of over 25 years, made major contributions to the US space program. Working in the American South during the Civil Rights Era, they overcame both race- and gender-based discrimination to launch brilliant and storied careers as mathematicians and engineers. These women were the unsung protagonists who shaped America’s destiny, playing a major role in the great drama of the nation’s history.