I just read, ReBoot, My Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Moved On by Julie Wainwright. Julie, who is the Founder of SmartNow.com, was kind enough to write one of the first blogs on Nextnik last October.  The blog focused on her experiences in 1999, being the head of a very well known company during it's very public failure.

For those that don't know the story, Julie was the CEO of the infamous Pets.com. Remember the sock puppet commercials? How about the dot com bubble burst? All of that seems tame with what we're going through now, but at the time it was huge news. People were investing in companies that ended up having pretty short shelf lives. Sadly, Pets.com was one of them.

ReBoot is a longer version of her Nextnik blog, and her blog on SmartNow.com. It gives some background on her family and growing up while dealing with her mother's illness. How life experiences molded her into a business leader, and the decisions that lead to the helm of Pets.com, the company that people have now used as an example to describe the dot com bubble burst in general.

It's a good read. The book is more like an extended magazine article. I was able to read it in a couple of hours. The insight Julie gives into her life and her recovery from the Pets.com ordeal, is inspiring. It mostly gives the facts of what happened both professionally and personally. She was in the middle of a divorce as well.

Toward the end though, she lists the five mistakes she feels she made and how she moved on from them.  This is part of her SmartNow blog and really the core of the book. The mistakes she deals with are not the professional ones, but life mistakes. How she let others decide her self worth, How she stopped believing in herself, how she stopped taking care herself, and how Wainwright moved on from each.

It's not so much of a self help book as an essay on how Wainwright was able to overcome several major defeats and come out stronger.  A lesson for all of us who have to deal with life's occasional bitter pill.

ReBoot, My Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Moved On is available through Amazon.com