TICKET TO LEAD
THE ROADMAP TO LEADERSHIP FOR TEENS AND YOUNG ADULTS. To become a leader, you need to act like a leader. This book shows you how!
Ticket to Lead accelerates your leadership journey by explaining the behaviors and skills you need and showing you how to apply them.​
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Ticket to Lead is aimed at high school and college-aged young adults, including recent graduates, who want to learn how to be leaders. If you want to lead a school club or student government, a sports team or a social group or charity, or apply your leadership skills as a gig worker or the founder of your own business, this is the book for you.
You will learn how to become a leader sooner than you expect while learning leadership principles that will last for a lifetime.
You will also discover why learning to lead now, at this stage of your life, is so valuable to your future. It can literally change your life.
You will learn that the fastest and best way to become a leader is by watching and learning from other leaders. Ticket to Lead accelerates your leadership journey by explaining the behaviors and skills you need and showing you how you can learn and apply them.
This book is an easy, flexible read. Once you have read the Introduction and Part One, you can read it cover to cover or jump around to the topics that interest you most. If you want to dig deeper now or later, you will find an appendix filled with additional leadership insights.
This book can change your life.
Learn to lead now, while you are still a young adult!
Ticket to Lead is also an excellent resource for coaches, teachers, counselors, parents, homeschoolers and others who are coaching, teaching and encouraging young adults who have the potential to become leaders.
Quick Start Guide to Leadership
Based on Ticket to Lead, Charlie's free Quick Start Guide to Leadership for Teens and Young Adults lays out the basics in an easy two-page format that will jumpstart any pathway to leadership. It's a powerful teaching tool for parents and coaches as well asyoung adults. Just click the button to read and download a printable PDF.
A note from Charlie about why he wrote Ticket to Lead
Ticket to Lead is one of my efforts at paying things forward. Leadership changed my life. I want to help it change yours.
I was a long way from being a leader during my middle and high school years. I was an only child, raised by my mom. We were financially challenged. My grades were good but my social skills were poor. I repeated seventh grade because of emotional problems.
I started learning to lead at the University of Florida (UF). I joined a fraternity, worked in student government and, in my senior year, was elected vice president of the student body. After graduating with high honors, being commissioned in the U.S. Army via ROTC and getting married, I went to Harvard Law School, where I began in the bottom 5% of my class and graduated cum laude three years later.
Following Harvard, I spent 18 years practicing corporate, banking, securities and technology law. I was VP and general counsel of a regional bank holding company. I taught at the UF College of Law. After my legal career, I was CEO of a private investment banking firm and a publicly traded federal savings bank, CFO of a publicly traded hospitality company and CEO of a semiconductor company that we turned around and took public.
In the process, I led and managed lawyers, bankers, securities brokers, construction and development executives and engineers, along with a cast of financial, marketing and administrative people. We accomplished a lot together, and I am grateful for their support and what I learned from them.