How to Get a Return on Failure by John C. Maxwell

Get Ahead – Even When You Lose!

The most successful people get ahead because they deal with failure positively. Since they know they can’t avoid failure, they make the best of it and gain from it. People who adopt this approach learn to build more substantial and significant success in their lives.

In his new book How to Get a Return on Failure, John Maxwell teaches readers how to turn misses into wins and losses into gains. He creates a positive roadmap anyone can follow during these difficult times and shows how changing your perspective on failure can transform your ability to grow, improve, and move forward.

Failure will always be a part of our lives. We cannot avoid it. But we can leverage it to create a better future for ourselves and others. When we do that, it separates us from the people who let failure stop or defeat them. Follow Maxwell’s advice and you’ll never look at failure the same way again.

Replacement by Nicolas Chaillan

Nicolas built AI for the Pentagon, sold Ask Sage for $250M, and now runs thirteen AI agents for roughly $200 a day — replacing the work of 40+ people.

This is not a doomsday warning. It's a solutions book — a playbook on which skills survive, how to build a one-person company with AI, how to future‑proof your career, and what to teach your kids.

Nicolas runs 13 AI agents for $200 a day. They do the work that used to require a team of forty people and over $10 million a year in salaries. That's not a thought experiment. That's his Tuesday.

Replacement tells that story — from a childhood in Marseille writing code at age 7, to becoming the first Chief Software Officer of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, to building 13 companies and engineering a $250 million exit with Ask Sage. It's the story of a builder who watched the tools he created start replacing the people he built them for.

This isn't another book about disruption. The word is "replacement" — of entire teams, entire professions, entire career paths. It's happening now, and America is sleepwalking through it while China deploys.

Every chapter weaves four threads: the immigrant who coded his way out of Marseille, the builder who started 13 companies, the Pentagon insider who saw China deploying while America debated, and the father worried about the world his daughters will inherit.

Reviews 

“Replacement isn’t just a book about technology or business, it’s about how to adapt and survive in modern society. Nicolas has inspired me to rethink how I operate the rest of my career; and, more importantly, how I shape my conversations with my daughters about their future. This book has arrived in the ‘Nic’ of time!” — Joe Saunders, CEO, RunSafe Security

“I’ve known Nicolas Chaillan for years as a path-breaker in the Department of Defense. He brought AI into government when too many policymakers were still trapped between fear, confusion, and fantasy. That is Nic’s pattern: he sees where the world is going before institutions are ready to admit it.
Replacement is powerful because it goes beyond AI or the future of work. At its core, it’s about judgment, courage, and having the moral compass to speak hard truths before the rest of the world is ready to hear them. Nic connects the principles that shaped his life, from Marseille to America to the Pentagon, to the defining question of this era: what happens when AI rewrites the old bargain between skill, work, and opportunity?
What makes this book matter is that it comes from someone who has spent his life building the future early, not commenting on it after the fact.”— Reuben Cleetus, AI Leader and Author

Too Strong For Your Own Good by Anette DeMattio MA

After six cancer diagnoses, Anette DeMattio learned something we're rarely taught: our bodies aren't betraying us - they're communicating. The same strength that helped you survive can quietly become the thing that disconnects you from yourself.

If you're the one who holds everything together — at work, at home, in your relationships — you already know what this feels like. You step up. You push through. You carry more than you should. And for a while… It works. Until it doesn't.

Too Strong For Your Own Good explores what happens when survival mode quietly becomes identity — when the coping mechanisms that once protected you slowly begin disconnecting you from yourself.

This book names those patterns - five of them, actually: The First Responder. The Empty Cup. The Cart Puller. The Stoic Swan. The Island.

By the time you meet them, you'll already recognize yourself in one-or all. And you'll begin learning how to shift it - without losing your drive, your ambition, or the parts of you that care deeply.

By coming home to yourself again.

Reviews 

"An affecting guide that effectively reframes the idea of unraveling as a necessary release... For readers who have learned to survive by being 'the strong one." — Kirkus Reviews 

"A warm, accessible guide to healing from the inside out. Healing isn't about getting there faster. It's about arriving more whole." — Publishers Weekly / BookLife

"I would recommend this book to people who are tired in a way sleep does not fix." — Literary Titan

'Leads the exhausted, overstretched, and always-there-for-others to reclaim their power and purpose." —BlueInk Review

"This book taught me what it really means to come home to myself and to be comfortable in my own body." — Readers' Favorite