REVIEW: Theresa Slater — The Language of Success (BOOK)
Theresa Slater’s new book is The Language of Success: An Interpreter’s Entrepreneurial Journey. At the beginning, she christens the book to herself, along with a quote from famous Paramount executive Sumner Redstone. Firstly, “I dedicate this book to my 15-year-old self. Thrown totally unprepared into a world that was often dangerous and constantly threatening.
Living hand to mouth, navigating crisis to crisis instead of navigating high school and living my best teenage life. Who, at 15, never could have envisioned success further than food in her mouth and a roof over her head.” Then Redstone’s typical, characteristic and matter-of-fact sardonicism: “Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes it’s built on catastrophe.”
I appreciated as an entrepreneur myself Slater’s noting that there is a ‘language’ for success. It really is true. Anyone who truly succeeds in business (really trying) has to start from being a phenomenal salesman. Initially, you have nothing (or close to nothing). But you have to make mountains of molehills that people have to buy, belief in one’s own self-aggrandizement alongside accomplishment is key.
This is a sentiment reflected by the like of magnates a la Barbara Corcoran, or Mark Cuban. But it’s expressed in an unusually subtle and sentimental way by Slater. The idea of actually humanizing the hustle highlights the profundity of it, the fact that the hustle isn’t just a grubby part of making it in business, it’s part of what makes up pursuit of the American Dream. It’s not an easy process, and people are quick to embrace the shameless aspects of it. But to highlight the entirety of the process adds this uncanny delicacy to it. How the pursuit of dreams, while grubby, while messy, while requiring a thick skin and a quick wit, makes the outcome if successfully realized that much rarer, and that much sweeter.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Language-Success-Interpreters-Entrepreneurial-Journey/dp/1637426208
“From the street smarts of a 15-year-old rose a triumphant entrepreneur whose resilience and determination forged a path to success. The Language of Success is a story of survival, self-improvement, and accomplishment,” Slater writes. “In these pages, the author walks us through her sometimes-tumultuous upbringing in a ‘milky-white’ town of little diversity, while striving to understand the bigger world around her.
From leaving home at 15 and facing daily challenges of survival, to finding those paths to nontraditional education and opportunities — this unorthodox route into the world of business and later linguistics showcases the opportunities and ‘go with your guts’ intuition that often lead to places you never dreamed of. The lessons learned through years of minimum wage jobs and struggle were later her building blocks for success. Over the course of two decades, she built her company, Empire Interpreting Service, into a leading language service provider (LSP). Theresa bootstrapped her company and molded it into a respected, award-winning organization that has been cited as the ‘gold standard’ in its field.”
“I think I have a unique history,” she adds, at the beginning of the book. “I think knowing it would help you understand me better and how my personal life journey shaped the future journey of my business.”
Colin Jordan
