Killing It

An Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Head Without Losing Your Heart

By: Sheryl O'Loughlin

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

The former CEO of Clif Bar, Co-founder of Plum, and serial entrepreneur offers insights about launching and growing a business while maintaining a fulfilled life in this practical guide filled with hard-won advice culled from the author’s own sometimes dark, raw experiences. With a foreword by Steve Blank.

Aspiring entrepreneurs are told that to launch a business, you must go all in, devoting every resource and moment to making it work. But following this advice comes at an enormous personal cost: divorce, addiction, even suicide. It means sacrificing the intangibles that make life worth living.

Sheryl O’Loughlin knows there is a better way. In Killing It, she shares the wisdom she’s gained from her successful experiences launching a company from the ground up (Plum), running two fast-growing companies (Clif Bar and REBBL), and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs (Stanford University). She tells it like it is: If you don’t invest in your wellbeing, your business will not succeed, nor will you.

Sheryl knows firsthand the difficulty of balancing the needs of her growing family with her physical and mental health, while managing other work and life challenges. In this warm, honest, and wise handbook, she gives you the essentials for killing it in business—without killing the rest of your life.

Filled with real-life examples and anecdotes, Killing It addresses common questions including:

• How do you prepare your significant other for your business venture?
• How do you time launching and growing your business with the ebb and flow of family life?
• How do you find joy in the day-to-day?
• How do you maintain meaningful, supportive friendships?
• How do you walk away and start again?

The ultimate life and business course, Killing It gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to start their enterprise and thrive—both in the office and at home.

Getting in the Head of an Entrepreneur

Sheryl O'Loughlin's book captivated us during our one-way drive to Florida, and what a ride it was! She expanded our meaning of Entrepreneurism beyond the stereotypes of high risk and high reward to include the realities of the intensity of the process, involving personal ecosystems easily poisoned. Sheryl tells a tale entrepreneur-specific that applies to many working moms.

Finally!

This book fills a much needed void in dealing with the personal life and experience of an entrepreneur. It doesn't talk about management theories in the porganization, rather it talks about personal management! So glad I got my ears on this one!

Great read! Insightful!

This was a great book! I wish the author would have read it though. The narrator was kinda annoying and hard to listen to. It's like she was trying to sound sexy and that took away from the message of the book. I wish the author would have narrated! It creates more of a connection, which makes me remember the details of the book.

Enjoyed every moment of Killing it

Excellent read! far far beyond my expectation, the book is about philosophy of life, entrepreneurship and much much more
John Chansari
CEO & Founder
Spicely Organics

A timeless, actionable personal story to be read

This is a very brave book, a raw insiders's guide to the real Entrepreneurship game. It's an urgent and powerful read for everyone who is obsessed with their own creations. Sheryl O'Loughlin writes from her own experience and passion about what it means to succeed as entrepreneur, wife and a mother. Killing It! Features important tips from Sheryl that will change the way you think about your job, your family, yourself, and may be even your industry.

Assumes Female Audience

Despite the fact that this book is written with a primarily female audience in mind, the author does a decent job of capturing some of the struggles which all self-motivated creative types tend to encounter. As addressed in the book, many of these hurdles are not often talked about, or are simply pushed aside as signs of weakness. It's refreshing to see a concerned author, who has the "street cred" to discuss such issues, making an earnest attempt to get the dialog rolling and bring these taboos to the forefront of our collective consciousness. I felt like the narrator's performance was a little dry, and probably didn't effectively capture the author's personality, but overall, this audio book was well worth the investment of negligible time and money.