Pauleanna Reid is a Canadian journalist, two time author, and celebrity ghostwriter. She’s a Senior Contributor at Forbes. She’s also the Founder of WritersBlok, a collective of freelance writers who create share-worthy content. Pauleanna is the author of two books, Everything I Couldn’t Tell My Mother as well as Mixed Emotions. Her fascinating life story has been covered by publications include Global News, FLARE, Huffington Post, ESSENCE Magazine and MTV Canada. And for the past six years, she’s been speaking across North America with a focus on empowering young people, especially women, in transition.

In this conversation (co-hosted by Pauleanna’s co-author and business partner Andrew Nguyen), we talked about embracing the grind, confronting failure, and overcoming doubt. We also talked about building empires, manifesting success, and staying the course.