Living In Your Top 1%

What would your life look like if you truly operated at your best—if you were living in your own top 1%? That’s the central question Alissa Finerman poses in Living in Your Top 1%, a blend of personal development, positive psychology, and actionable coaching practice. Rather than comparing yourself to society’s top one percent in wealth or status, Finerman invites you to define success by your own standards. Her central argument is simple but powerful: your top 1% is your personal best—your most fulfilled, engaged, and purpose-driven self.

Drawing on her transition from Wall Street finance to life and executive coaching, Finerman reveals that fulfillment doesn’t come from material success but from aligning your energy, goals, and actions with what truly excites you. Through nine structured rituals, the book offers a roadmap to assess where you are, create a compelling vision, and implement specific behaviors that help you thrive. Each ritual builds a foundation of mindset, strengths, goals, and resilience to help you live with purpose.

From Wall Street to Self-Discovery

Finerman’s own story sets the tone. After years of outward success on Wall Street, she felt empty—the kind of empty that no bonus could fix. Getting laid off, she says, was a “blessing in disguise,” pushing her to pursue what she loved: motivating others. Through coaching, she found fulfillment and energy that money never gave her. Her journey models what this book teaches: leaving status behind to live in authenticity.

This personal story grounds her nine rituals in real life. She acknowledges fear, doubt, and uncertainty but insists that small, deliberate shifts—like changing self-talk, defining goals, or adding new daily rituals—create transformation. (It’s reminiscent of James Clear’s concept in Atomic Habits that small habits compound into major identity shifts.)

What “Top 1%” Really Means

Unlike society’s measurement of the top 1% as a club of competition, Finerman redefines it as a personal target: using all your strengths and assets to live your best life. It’s not about perfection or beating others—it’s about fulfillment, growth, and contribution. Your top 1% moment could be finishing a half-marathon, nurturing a meaningful relationship, or starting your dream business. For each person, the destination looks different, but the feeling—of engagement and alignment—is shared.

“Living in your top 1%,” Finerman writes, “is the practice of using all your strengths, talents, and assets to live your best life possible.”

She challenges us to reconsider where we’re settling—where we’re on autopilot in “comfortable routines.” Her method empowers you to think as CEO of your own life, to get off cruise control, and to treat goals as sacred investments in your purpose.

The Structure: From Mindset to Mastery

The book unfolds through three major parts—Assess, Create, and Implement—each containing three rituals. Together, they form a system for transforming thought into action:

• Part I: Assess helps you examine where you are, make yourself a priority, and lead “You, Inc.” with conscious decision-making.
• Part II: Create focuses on designing goals and embracing possibilities—visualizing ideal outcomes and stepping into your stretch zone.
• Part III: Implement anchors those changes with resilience, consistency, and balance for long-term success.

Each ritual ends with concise bottom-line summaries, stories, and action prompts—transforming ideas into an applied framework you can use immediately. Finerman blends psychology (Carol Dweck’s growth mindset), business logic (managing “You, Inc.” like an enterprise), and coaching tools (goal setting, daily reflection, and energy focus) into a cohesive system.

Why It Matters Now

In a culture obsessed with external benchmarks—followers, salaries, rankings—Finerman offers a return to what matters: defining success on your own terms. Her argument is deeply relevant in a post-pandemic world where people are reevaluating work, burnout, and purpose. This book is part of a broader movement (seen in books like The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown and Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans) that reorients achievement toward authenticity and self-leadership.

Ultimately, Living in Your Top 1% is both motivational and methodological. It teaches you how to design meaningful goals, expand your mental framework from “I can’t” to “I can,” and build resilience when faced with detours. Each reader builds a personalized roadmap—what Finerman calls a “YOU INC. Blueprint”—to measure progress not against others but against your evolving potential.

A New Definition of Winning

Finerman closes her introduction with a message that fuels the whole book: it’s not about being the best in the world; it’s about being your best self in the world. Living in your top 1% is a continual cycle of assessment, creation, and renewal. It invites you to wake up each morning asking, “What does my top 1% look like today?” and to have the courage to lead your life accordingly.

In Finerman’s first ritual, Be the CEO of You, Inc., she frames your life as a thriving business—with you at the helm. The metaphor is bold and practical: just as a company must evaluate its operations, invest in key assets, and rebalance underperforming sectors, so must you. Your goal as CEO is to master self-leadership—assessing where you are, prioritizing your wellbeing, and creating rituals that enrich your performance and fulfillment.

Building the YOU INC. Blueprint

Finerman encourages you to assess six areas of life—Career, Relationships, Health, Finances, Fun & Creativity, and Personal Growth—and rate each on a scale from 1 to 10. Just like a portfolio’s balance sheet, you identify which areas are assets and which are liabilities. Then you design strategies to bring lagging areas up to par. This exercise helps you visualize gaps between “where you are now” and “where you want to be.”

For example, Allison’s story illustrates this strategy in action. As a small business owner and mother, she felt overwhelmed and unable to make time for herself. Instead of scrapping everything, she created a child-care co-op with neighbors, freeing five hours a week for personal time. Those small adjustments helped her bring balance, energy, and new business clients. Her win shows that treating time and energy as “capital” leads to measurable returns.

Make Yourself the Priority

Finerman’s point is clear: too many of us manage everything but ourselves. Yet the greatest asset YOU INC. has is—you. Managing yourself is not selfish; it’s necessary. Like airlines tell passengers, “Put your oxygen mask on first.” When you operate at your best, you bring your best to others. Through self-assessment tools and reflection exercises, Finerman guides readers to determine whether they truly make themselves a priority or merely squeeze themselves in “if there’s time left.”

“Making YOU INC. a priority is non-negotiable, rather than optional.”

Rituals as Growth Engines

Just like successful leaders have morning practices and consistent habits, top performers have life rituals they repeat to sustain energy and focus. Finerman compares positive rituals to brand consistency—they define how you show up every day. Her client Patrick, for instance, discovered that although his early morning workouts used to energize him, they now caused emotional distress because he kept encountering his ex-spouse afterward. By changing gyms, a small but intentional shift, he renewed his mental space and unblocked his energy.

As CEO of You, Inc., your job is constant self-assessment and refinement. You must continually rebalance your portfolio, update your strategy, and fine-tune your rituals to meet new challenges. The message: leadership begins with self-management. When you master yourself, everything else follows.

Finerman’s second ritual introduces a cornerstone principle of personal performance: mindset determines everything. Drawing from Carol Dweck’s research on growth versus fixed mindsets, she argues that the difference between “I can” and “I can’t” is not semantic—it’s transformational. This ritual helps you shift from doubt to capability, turning your inner dialogue into a source of motivation rather than defeat.

From Thought to Reality

Finerman maps a simple yet profound chain: Thoughts → Beliefs → Mindset → Actions → Reality. The majority of thoughts we think each day—up to 95%, according to the National Science Foundation—are repeated. So if you fill your mental playlist with “I can’t,” that thought becomes the default setting of your life. Change the thought, and your belief system follows. Her own story on Wall Street demonstrates this: facing rejection and difficulty building her account list, she repeated a single mantra—“I can turn this client into a top account”—until it became true. That shift turned a small hedge fund contact into a $5 billion client.

Beliefs of the Top 1%

Top performers build belief systems rooted in possibility, not limitation. Finerman lists core affirmations shared by top 1% thinkers: “I choose words that are positive,” “I think without limits,” and “I create my ideal lifestyle.” Dawn’s story brings this to life. As a new college graduate with no experience, she was discouraged from selling real estate. But within three years, she became a six-figure top producer, because she chose to believe she could do it. Her case proves that background matters less than belief.

Condition Your Mind

Like an athlete training for peak performance, you must condition your mind daily. Finerman recommends practices like journaling, meditation, and repeating empowering mantras to replace negative input with positive focus. Her client Susan exemplified this transformation—by tracking her daily thoughts for one week, she realized how habitually negative she had become. Within a month of reframing her speech and thoughts, Susan’s coworkers noticed her positivity and offered her a new leadership project.

“Change your words, change your life.”

This mindset ritual teaches that resilience begins in language. Every “I can” builds neural alignment toward growth, while each “I can’t” reinforces stagnation. By conditioning your vocabulary and attention, you rewrite your mental code—and open the door to new results.

Finerman’s third ritual is about leveraging what already makes you powerful. Instead of wasting energy fixing weaknesses, she insists you pivot toward your strengths—the skills, values, and traits that bring you alive. Building on research by Martin Seligman and the Gallup Organization, she shows that people who use their strengths daily are six times more engaged and three times more likely to have a high quality of life.

Know Your Strength Portfolio

Finerman recommends identifying your top five strengths using tools like the VIA Survey of Character Strengths or StrengthsFinder 2.0. These assessments reveal what motivates you. For Kristen, a finance manager struggling with burnout, her top strengths—gratitude, creativity, and love of learning—led to her breakthrough. Instead of forcing herself through monotonous routines, she began applying her strengths by writing, volunteering, and hosting dinners. By doing what energized her, her joy and professional confidence soared—and soon, her career advanced too.

Apply Strengths Strategically

To perform in your top 1%, you must bring your strengths into every area of YOU INC. When facing challenges, they become your leverage points. Tim, a marketing executive struggling to launch his own firm, rediscovered his core strengths—leadership, humor, and determination—and used them to empower his small team. Within 18 months, he built a profitable business with 12 clients and a motivated culture, all because he led from strengths rather than frustration.

Weaknesses: Address Only What Matters

Top 1%ers don’t obsess about fixing every flaw. Finerman advises addressing only those weaknesses that directly block performance. If you want to run a company but lack public speaking skills, that weakness matters. If you dislike golf but don’t need it professionally, let it go. She even offers a “Weakness Makeover” system—commit to a weakness that matters, believe you can improve, take one step, then stay on course. The point isn’t perfection—it’s progress driven by intention.

When you pair self-awareness with self-confidence, your strengths become exponential. Finerman’s ritual reframes power not as fixing yourself, but as amplifying what’s already great. It’s a cornerstone of sustainable peak performance.

The fourth ritual is where mindset meets motion. Finerman argues that goals are the language of transformation—they turn vague desires into measurable outcomes. Drawing from psychology and real-world stories, she provides a toolkit for creating meaningful goals through a three-phase process: The Why, The How, and The What Now.

The Why: Purpose Behind Goals

Research from Sonja Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness) supports Finerman’s claim that people with personally meaningful goals are happier. Goals create momentum, purpose, and accountability. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life exemplifies this. From a teenage Austrian bodybuilder to global movie star and California governor, every step began with a written, vividly imagined goal card. His success wasn’t privilege—it was clarity and consistency. Your goals, too, begin with meaning: what would excite you enough to stay committed on difficult days?

The How: A System for Smart Action

Finerman introduces strategies beyond the common SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) formula. She adds seven success practices, including starting with the ideal situation, aligning goals with your values, making them harmonious, and writing them down. When goals are visualized in writing, they anchor your commitment—the psychological equivalent of signing a contract with yourself. (Neuroscience shows writing goals boosts achievement by up to 42%.)

The What Now: Small Steps = Big Results

The book’s mantra—small steps equal big results—comes alive here. Whether training for her first triathlon or helping a client like Peter save $5,000 in nine months, Finerman shows that breaking goals into micro-steps creates momentum. Each small win becomes evidence that change is happening. She even draws from Mark Twain’s wisdom: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Pam Koner’s charity Family-to-Family began with a single phone call and grew into 800,000 donated meals. Every monumental impact starts with one intentional act.

Finerman encourages you to commit to daily small steps—what she calls “Tier One goals”—and to celebrate progress. This approach not only demystifies success but makes it habitual.

In her fifth ritual, Finerman teaches what may be the most freedom-giving mental shift: learning to think without obstacles. Too often, we see roadblocks where there should be starting lines. Instead of confronting fears and limits head-on, she invites us to visualize ideal outcomes first—then find ways to make them real. Thinking this way rewires your problem-solving mindset to see possibilities instead of problems.

Rewriting the Rules of Possibility

Finerman illustrates this through the story of Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, who at 41 returned to compete after five knee surgeries and motherhood—and won three silver medals. Her proof statement: “The water doesn’t know your age.” Likewise, Ted Turner ignored critics to launch CNN, the world’s first 24-hour news network. Both examples show that limitless thinking begins with one person who refuses to let others define their boundaries.

(Psychologically, this leverages “cognitive reframing”—what positive psychology calls interpreting events through possibility rather than restriction.)

Obstacles as Partners, Not Enemies

Instead of avoiding obstacles, Finerman asks you to classify them. A speed bump slows you temporarily; a detour requires resourcefulness; a roadblock demands resilience. Once identified, obstacles lose their mystery. Her story of Jennifer Goodman Linn, who battled cancer while founding the charity Cycle for Survival, demonstrates how obstacles can fuel purpose. Even during her fifth recurrence of cancer, Linn inspired thousands, raising millions for research. Her motto: “I might have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me.”

Turning Excuses into Energy

Finerman reminds us that excuses are “a dime a dozen”—and usually a symptom of low commitment. Instead of clinging to “I’m too busy” or “too old,” she suggests asking, “What’s one small step I can take right now?” Over time, this mental discipline trains your mind to jump to solutions faster than excuses. When you consistently visualize possibilities first, obstacles become launchpads for creativity. In essence, this ritual reprograms your cognitive default from fear to focus.

Living in your top 1% mindset means not ignoring obstacles, but redefining them as feedback. The transformation begins when you stop saying “I can’t” and start asking “How can I?”

The sixth ritual introduces a defining character of high performers: they live in their stretch zone—the dynamic space between comfort and stress. Finerman explains that true growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone, where life is predictable, nor in your stress zone, where burnout awaits. The magic happens in between—in the place where learning, confidence, and courage intersect.

The Three Zones of Action

Finerman splits life’s performance zones into three:

• Comfort Zone: safe, predictable, and familiar—but stagnant.
• Stretch Zone: balanced challenge and excitement—where you grow and learn.
• Stress Zone: overload and fatigue that crush creativity.

She illustrates this with Jessica Grant, an attorney who took on a mammoth employment lawsuit against Wal-Mart—her first as a lead counsel. Facing dozens of opposing lawyers, she stretched daily, mastering new legal areas and managing performance anxiety. Her persistence resulted in a $172 million verdict, the largest employment case of its time. Her success embodies the stretch ethos: discomfort as the driver of extraordinary growth.

Stretch, Don’t Stress

Finerman warns that if you live too long in high stress, you lose perspective and creativity. She recommends scheduling priorities (rather than prioritizing your schedule), embracing delegation, saying no, and practicing presence. Sean’s story proves how this works—by leaving a draining radio job and starting a youth coaching business, he rebalanced his stress into stretch, building both income and family time.

“A boat is always safe in the harbor, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

This ritual challenges you to set your sails toward discomfort—intentionally. Living in your stretch zone means testing limits with calculated courage, not reckless haste. It’s the foundation for sustainable expansion and adventure.

The seventh ritual is about the backbone of success: resilience—the ability to rise every time you fall. Finerman compares setbacks to unexpected detours in the road trip of YOU INC. Everyone, from Michael Jordan to Oprah Winfrey to Walt Disney, had failures that became catalysts. Resilience is not toughness alone; it’s adaptability born from mindset and meaning.

Resilience Defined

In plain terms, resilience is your ability to overcome and bounce back from adversity. Finerman references psychologists Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté (The Resilience Factor)—noting that resilience is learned, not innate. It grows through experiences that teach recovery and through optimistic thinking that treats failure as feedback.

How Resilient People Think

Resilient people, Finerman explains, regulate emotions, avoid exaggerating negatives, learn from mistakes, and maintain perspective. When Finerman was laid off from Wall Street, she could have labeled herself a failure. Instead, she reframed it as liberation—a chance to realign her life. That reframing, she says, birthed everything that followed, from her coaching certification to her writing career.

Five Steps to Strengthen Resilience

She offers a five-step model:

• Bring awareness to thinking patterns.
• Set meaningful goals that motivate persistence.
• Learn from mistakes and extract lessons.
• Build confidence through small wins.
• Strengthen supportive relationships.

Finerman reminds you that resilience is built one recovery at a time. Each challenge you overcome forms part of your “resilience résumé,” preparing you for future uncertainty. Those who master this practice don’t fear failure—they expect and integrate it into growth.

Ritual Eight unlocks the operational mechanics of sustained excellence—Finerman’s three Cs: Choice, Commitment, and Consistency. These are the variables that make or break progress. Choice is direction, commitment is fuel, and consistency is motion. Together, they define the gap between wishful thinking and achievement.

Choice: Defining Your Direction

Every outcome begins with a choice. Finerman uses Candy Lightner’s creation of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) as a prototype of empowered choice. After tragedy, Lightner channeled pain into purpose and changed national policy. Likewise, every day you choose how to invest your time and attention—the greatest currencies of YOU INC. Align your choices to your tier-one goals, she says, or risk scattering your energy.

Commitment: All In or Not at All

Commitment differentiates professionals from dabblers. Using Zappos as an example, Finerman notes that the company pays $2,000 for new hires to quit—so that only the truly committed remain. She suggests you evaluate where your commitments lie: which ones energize you and which drain you? Her self-assessment exercises help you cut commitments that don’t serve your goals, allowing you to recommit with full energy to what matters most.

Consistency: The Habit of Excellence

Finerman likens consistency to brand reliability. Starbucks thrives by offering a predictable experience; Roger Federer dominates tennis through disciplined repetition. For individuals, consistent daily action transforms dreams into results. The same applies to you: success is not the reward for a burst of effort but the compound interest of daily behaviors. Even micro-rituals—waking up ten minutes earlier, journaling, or taking a nightly gratitude walk—create alignment through rhythm.

“It’s not what you do once in a while that shapes your life, but what you do consistently.” – Tony Robbins

Together, the three Cs form the behavioral blueprint of all top 1%ers. Life changes not when you make impossible promises to yourself, but when your daily choices, commitments, and consistencies line up with your goals.

The ninth and final ritual grounds the entire program in sustainability: balance. Finerman admits balance is not static; it’s a dynamic state of awareness. Much like a tightrope walker, you recalibrate constantly. Without balance, even the most ambitious goals collapse under fatigue. Her actionable framework—seeing the bigger picture, honoring non-negotiables, and making conscious trade-offs—teaches how to stay centered even in motion.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

Balance begins by connecting daily choices to long-term meaning. When Finerman’s client Mary realized skipping lunch was derailing her health and happiness, she shifted her routines—packing meals, planning ahead, and running with her boyfriend. The result wasn’t just weight loss; it was emotional steadiness. Seeing the whole pattern of cause and effect helps you act proactively, not reactively.

Defining Non-Negotiables

Non-negotiables are the guardrails of balance—core values and habits you refuse to compromise. Finerman lists examples: sleep, exercise, integrity, time with family. By naming yours, you know what to protect when life accelerates. These boundaries sustain your energy and prevent self-neglect disguised as productivity. (Similar principles appear in Stephen Covey’s “first things first” philosophy.)

Making Conscious Trade-offs

Every “yes” carries a hidden “no.” Finerman’s client Kim learned this when torn between work deadlines and a friend’s birthday weekend. By mapping her priorities, she found a compromise—attending the trip but returning early to finish work. Balance isn’t avoidance; it’s flexible recalibration. Finerman encourages frequent self-reviews of your commitments to preserve equilibrium.

This final ritual completes the circle. When you balance ambition with humanity, discipline with rest, and giving with receiving, you create the conditions for sustainable success. Living in your top 1% isn’t a sprint—it’s a lifelong dance between growth and grounding.