REVIEW: Helen Yu — Ascend Your Start-Up (BOOK)
Helen Yu’s new book is an example of both precise, knowledgeable writing about an easily exclusive topic for specific audiences and something that is a product of its time. More and more the corporate world is being forced to grapple with a changing cultural landscape, and with that demands reflecting said landscape’s specific alterations when it comes to the tenets of industry. Some are choosing to implement heavily Eastern spiritualist touches to company practices, such as the incorporation of meditation, certain forms of holistic and corporate psychological practices, and a step-by-step breakdown of essential business practice to make leadership more transparent, more malleable, and therefore collectively more human for all involved. “What would you like to be remembered for as a person?”
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Yu writes in one of the book’s seven, extensive chapters. “When a person goes to a funeral, no one talks about the business they were in. You remember how that person made you feel based on what you experienced together or how they supported you or how they helped you through challenging times. What legacy do you want to leave behind? How do you want to be remembered?” If Joe Biden once said that all politics is local, and all politics is personal, then the same sort of intellectual applications appear to be clamping down on business. Yu cites this both as an example of progressive change as well as something of a necessity for being an innovator in today’s world. One requires a certain amount of objectivity and open-mindedness, she argues, to continue to innovate and synchronize with pragmatic networking choices.
Probably the most generous part of Yu’s book, evocatively titled Ascend Your Start-Up: Conquer the Five Disconnects to Accelerate Growth, is it being specifically targeted for budding entrepreneurs. Yu never talks down to the target audience nor tries to love bomb them with excessively flowery language choice. She’s clinical and direct, the compassionate side of her literary persona more evident in her personal, analogous creative choices. As much as the book is a how-to guide and love letter to the budding entrepreneur making the smartest choice for his or her enterprise, the book is also a love letter to Yu’s own grandmother.
She is cited as a major force for good in Yu’s life, and her sense of perseverance and intelligence clearly plays into Yu’s own strategic outlook and resulting choices of approach. “Making Grandma proud, spreading her ashes on a tall mountain was a ‘peak’ for me,” she writes. “Early in my career, I thought staying special and creating a legacy meant working twice as hard as anyone else. Working hard is important, but working hard does not create a legacy. No statues are built for the hardest worker in the minds of people. A decade later, making a positive impact is how I stay special.”
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Ascend-Your-Start-Up-Disconnects-Accelerate-ebook/dp/B08Z5TBC3S
It’s this sort of generosity of spirit that makes Ascend Your Start-Up feel genuinely inspirational. That’s a hard thing to say about leadership advice books in general, let alone many coming out these days. Often the certifiable intellectual or public figure feels coldly removed regardless of their attempts to humanize themselves to the reader. But Yu isn’t interested in attempts at direct humanization. She’s here to tell it to you like it is, but from a really pure place.
That’s humanizing…
Colin Jordan
