Wake Up Happy: The Dream Big, Win Big Guide to Transforming Your Life

From America’s favorite football player turned morning talk show host—a man who makes just about everything look easy—a mélange of stories and motivational advice to inspire the reader to turn up the heat and go from good to great in pursuit of their personal ambitions.

Michael Strahan spent his childhood on a military base in Europe, where community meant everything, and life, though idyllic, was different. For one, when people referenced football they meant soccer. So when Michael’s father suggested he work toward a college scholarship by playing football in Texas, where tens of thousands of people show up for a weekend game, the odds were long. Yet he did, indeed, land a scholarship and from there a draft into the NFL where he scaled the league’s heights, broke records, and helped his team win the Super Bowl as a result of which he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. How? By developing “Strahan’s Rules”—a mix of mental discipline, positive thinking, and a sense of play. He also used the Rules to forge a successful post pro-ball career as cohost with Kelly Ripa on Live!—a position for which he was considered the longshot—and much more.

In Wake Up Happy, Michael shares personal stories about how he gets and stays motivated and how readers can do the same in their quest to attain their life goals.

Here are a few of “Strahan’s Rules”:

1) Listen to other people, but don’t take their opinions for fact. Have your own experiences. Draw your own conclusions.

2) You can’t change other people but you can change how you act around them. Usually, that’s more than enough.

3) Don’t pre-judge. Help can—and will—come from the most unexpected places. Be open to everything around you.

Inspiring and chock full of advice that will help the reader make significant strides toward pursuing his or her dream, Wake Up Happy is a book no one, young or old, male or female will want to miss.

NFL legend Michael Strahan made his name on the football field, setting the record for single season sacks in 2001 and being inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014, but his star has shined brighter and for longer than his 216 history-making games with the New York Giants, which included a win at Super Bowl XLII. In 2008, he joined the Fox NFL Sunday pregame show as a commentator, and in 2012, he beat a competitive roster of candidates to replace Regis Philbin as co-host of the wildly popular Live! with Kelly & Michael. In April 2014, he joined Good Morning America as a special cohost, and Barbara Walters selected him as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014.

Veronica Chambers was an editor for The New York Times Magazine, a culture writer for Newsweek, and a senior associate editor at Premiere magazine. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Glamour, among many other publications. She is also the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, Mama's Girl. In 2000 she received a fellowship from the Japan Society to spend several months researching in Japan. She fell in love with the country and has returned for extended stays every year since.