No Pain, No Gaines: The Good Stuff Doesn’t Come Easy

Gaines (Capital Gaines), former cohost of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, dispenses tips on building one’s personal network in this insightful guide to forging “authentic human connection.” Gaines defines a network as “the group of people with beating hearts and passions who live and love and try and fail, and who are there beside you as you do the same,” and writes that it requires as much sweat, pain, and fear—and is as important—as hard physical work. He encourages readers to think of a network as more than a business concept and focus instead on meaningful relationships: instead of asking, “How can you help me get ahead?” he suggests wondering, “What can we learn from one another?” Gaines also asks readers to try “fear fact-finding” by creating a list to illustrate how likely imagined fears are to happen. Each chapter is rounded out with a handwritten “bottom line” truism (“living true to yourself is a nonnegotiable”) that has shaped Gaines’s worldview. Throughout, his vulnerability is charmingly refreshing: “I’m asking you to keep your arrows in the quiver for just a moment and hear me out,” he writes of facing fears. Fans of Fixer Upper and the Gaines’s Magnolia Network are in for a treat. Agent: Byrd Leavell, United Talent Agency. (Mar.)