James Patterson has written more bestsellers than most authors will ever read—thrillers, mysteries, romances, middle-grade adventures, even a few picture books. He’s sold over 425 million copies worldwide and is one of the most prolific storytellers in publishing history. But Disrupt Everything—and Win: Take Control of Your Future, co-authored with leadership expert Patrick Leddin, marks a new kind of Patterson book, one that fuses story with strategy, urgency with practicality.
Patrick Leddin, a professor at Vanderbilt University, is a former U.S. Army Ranger and leadership consultant, whose clients include Nike, Google, and the U.S. Air Force. His previous book, The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, focused on helping readers strengthen their character and communication habits.
Now, the two have teamed up on Disrupt Everything—and Win: Take Control of Your Future, a book about how to survive disruption, harness it, and ultimately thrive in it.
The pairing makes surprising sense. Patterson brings pacing, instinct, and a flair for storytelling; Leddin brings the structure, research, and field-tested frameworks. Together, they’ve created a book that reads like a playbook for the modern world—a world where, as Patterson put it, “You’ve got five seconds in a bookstore” and even less time to adapt.
Their Author Insider AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) was fast, funny, and full of unfiltered advice on writing, marketing, collaboration, and purpose. Here are ten standout moments that capture the best of what they shared.
(Editor’s note: some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.)
1) Earn your audience’s attention
Before they talk about writing or selling, Patterson goes straight to relevance. If you can’t tell your audience why your idea matters to them—immediately—you’ve already lost.
James Patterson: “You got to immediately convince me why I should read this thing. What’s in it for me? What’s in it for you is is huge in terms of anything you want to sell.”
That mindset applies to everything: book proposals, jacket copy, even chapter titles. The audience doesn’t owe you attention; you earn it by making relevance obvious from the first line.
2) Mission statements aren’t fluff—they’re focus
The word “mission” gets thrown around a lot, but for Patterson and Leddin, it’s not corporate jargon; it’s a tool for decision-making. When everything feels uncertain, mission is the compass.
James Patterson: “I can’t imagine, honestly, any company operating without a good mission statement.”
Patrick Leddin: “We spend one chapter on mission because—one it can be a little bit overdone, but two—if you do it the right way, it can be very, very helpful...”
Leddin’s test for a mission statement: if a distracted stranger can’t repeat it back after one read, it’s not clear enough yet. As Patterson later emphasized, it is “essential for almost any business or institution... to have a mission statement which is comprehensible.”
Once you’ve nailed it, every big decision gets easier: “That’s not our mission.”
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