She Didn’t Just Survive the Falls. She Studied Them.
Most leaders can tell you about a setback that changed them. Few can point to seventeen of them — each one documented, analyzed, and eventually used as fuel to come back stronger than before.
Lindsey Vonn is not most leaders.
Rise: My Story is the first memoir from the most decorated female skier of all time: 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, 3 Olympic medals, 7 World Championship medals — and a catalog of injuries so extensive it would have ended most careers several times over. But what makes Rise required reading for the CFW community isn’t the trophy count. It’s what Vonn does with the losses.
This is a book about what elite resilience actually looks like from the inside.
Who Is Lindsey Vonn?
If the name rings a bell but the details are fuzzy, here’s the short version: Vonn grew up in Minnesota, moved across the country as a teenager to chase a dream most people told her was too big, and went on to become the most successful female alpine ski racer in history. She was the first American woman to win an Olympic downhill gold medal, and she held the record for World Cup wins longer than anyone in the sport.
She retired in 2019 — not on her own terms, but on her body’s — after a career that had included so many comebacks from injury that she eventually built an entire philosophy around the process. She is also the founder of the Lindsey Vonn Foundation, which empowers girls through education and athletics.
She is, in short, someone who has thought very hard about what it takes to keep going when everything in you wants to stop.
So, What’s It Actually About?
Vonn opens Rise with a level of candor that immediately distinguishes it from the polished, everything-happens-for-a-reason sports memoir. She talks about her decades-long struggle with depression — not as a chapter she’s closed, but as a real and ongoing part of her life that she managed alongside some of the greatest athletic achievements in her sport’s history. She talks about the toll that relentless ambition takes on a body, and on relationships, and on a sense of self.
And then she talks about how she got back up. Every single time.
The book is structured around the defining moments of her career — the victories, yes, but more revealingly, the crashes. Vonn is precise about the mechanics of each setback: what happened, what it cost her, what the recovery process actually looked like (not the highlight reel, but the unglamorous, grinding, sometimes terrifying reality of it), and what she learned. That precision is what makes Rise so useful for leaders. This isn’t inspiration without instruction. It’s a masterclass in resilience methodology from someone who has had more practice at it than almost anyone alive.
She also writes with striking honesty about the particular pressures of being a woman at the top of a sport — the scrutiny, the double standards, the way her appearance was commented on even as her performance records went unmatched. For professional women who have navigated similar dynamics in their own fields, those passages will land with uncomfortable familiarity.
What You’ll Take Away
- Resilience is a practice, not a personality trait. Vonn doesn’t describe herself as someone who is naturally tough. She describes herself as someone who has built toughness through repetition — through choosing, over and over again, to get back on the mountain. That reframe makes the quality feel accessible rather than innate.
- How you talk to yourself in the hard moments is everything. One of the book’s most revelatory threads is about Vonn’s internal dialogue during injury and recovery. The mindset practices she developed — often without calling them that — turn out to be sophisticated psychological tools. Leaders will recognize them immediately.
- Excellence and mental health struggles are not mutually exclusive. Vonn’s willingness to be frank about her depression while simultaneously documenting a record-breaking career is one of the most important things about this book. It gives permission — to readers at every level — to be both high-achieving and human.
- The comeback is the real credential. Vonn won a lot of races. But what the book makes clear is that the quality that set her apart wasn’t her winning — it was her returning. For leaders who have navigated professional setbacks, restructurings, or failures, that’s a framework worth sitting with.
- Your platform is an asset worth using. In the book’s later chapters, Vonn reflects on how she used her visibility to push for changes in her sport — more equitable prize money, more coverage of women’s events, more seats at the table. It’s a reminder that influence, once built, is most powerful when it’s pointed outward.
Why We’re Recommending It
Leadership books usually give you frameworks. Rise gives you a life — messy, extraordinary, honestly told — and lets you extract the frameworks yourself. There’s something more durable about learning resilience from someone who has actually lived it than from someone who has theorized it.
Read it for the story. Keep it for the lesson.
Get The Book
Rise: My Story is available now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Books-A-Million.
Learn more about Lindsey Vonn and her foundation at lindseyvonn.com.
