Clasp What Matters
"Chaos doesn't scare me. Wasting a life does."
A warm, funny, unflinching memoir about faith, grit, and building things that actually last — from an Iowa farm girl who became a CEO, a keynote speaker, and the person organizations call when the doors might not stay open.
Jodee O'Brien was raised in a scrappy little tax office wedged between a cement plant and a meat-processing plant in small-town Iowa — paid in chocolate pie. She built her first company on a folding card table with a screeching dial-up modem and a newborn nearby. Then life tore up the plan, and she started over from scratch. She would do it more than once.
Clasp What Matters travels from a dairy farm in Iowa to boardrooms in Texas, from her time at United Way to a mother's funeral where a lifetime of small kindnesses showed up to say goodbye — all chasing one stubborn idea:
Legacy is not built in big moments.
It's built in the small, daily decisions about how we treat the people in front of us.
Part memoir, part pep talk, part permission slip, this is a book for women entrepreneurs, leaders, nonprofit boards, and anyone refusing to play small with the one life they've been handed. Expect hard-won leadership wisdom, real talk about resilience and reinvention, a healthy dose of humor — and the radical idea that joy isn't the reward for the work. It's the fuel.
They came in their work coats, which is the detail I keep coming back to. Not their church clothes — their work coats, the canvas ones with the company names stitched over the heart, because they had closed up the shop or left the field or stepped out of the cab of the truck and driven straight here. They came from three counties over. They came in a slow brown river through the propped door, and they did not look like mourners so much as like people reporting for a shift.
"She did our taxes thirty-one years. Never raised her price on us. Not once… and she never made me feel like the bad year was me."
The small, ordinary, unglamorous decision about how you treat the person directly in front of you is the only kind of monument that ever actually gets built. The big moments are mostly for the people watching. The small ones are for keeps.
My first friend was a toad, and I want to be clear that this was a mutual arrangement, at least at the start. I named him Herman. He was not a glamorous companion. He did not do tricks. He sat. He blinked the slow, disappointed blink of the amphibian. I brought him offerings and I told him things, the way you tell a toad things, knowing he won't repeat them and suspecting he isn't listening, which is, frankly, the ideal confidant.
"Honey, you don't get to keep most things. You just get to love them while they're under the step."
You can find a friend exactly where you're planted. You don't have to wait for a better spot, a bigger yard, a real pet, a finished house. You bloom in the field you're standing in, even if the field is plywood and the friend is a toad.
Leaders & Founders
Anyone building an organization meant to outlast them — and wrestling with what it takes to make it last.
Women in Business
Entrepreneurs and changemakers navigating reinvention, resilience, and refusing to play small.
Nonprofit Boards
Mission-driven teams thinking about legacy, succession, and continuity beyond a single founder.
Clasp what matters.
You'll close it with clarity, courage, and a fresh grip on what matters most. Because joy isn't the reward for the work — it's the fuel.
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