Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

I read Be Ready When the Luck Happens in the jacuzzi with several bottles of champagne nearby, which feels like an entirely appropriate way to read Ina Garten. I love this women and I knew it was going to be good, so I popped the champagne especially.

I expected beautiful houses, fabulous food, Jeffrey, Paris, the Hamptons and plenty of behind-the-scenes Barefoot Contessa stories. What I wasn’t expecting was one of the best books about reinvention, taking risks and building a life you actually want that I’d read in a long time. In fact, this was the best memoir I read that year (I read it in 2025, but it was too good not to share in our new leadership library).

Ina Garten has this wonderful ability to make everything look effortless. The food, the houses, the gardens, the television shows, even the way she casually produces something fabulous for Jeffrey feels as though this is simply how life happens in Ina’s world.

Her memoir reveals something rather different. There was an enormous amount of work, courage, uncertainty and reinvention behind that apparently effortless life. And that’s why I think Be Ready When the Luck Happens belongs in The Daily Round’s Leadership Library.

Luck looks remarkably like preparation

The title really sums up Ina’s approach to life. She doesn’t pretend luck hasn’t played a part in her success, but the interesting bit is what she did when an opportunity appeared. Before Barefoot Contessa, Ina worked in Washington, including as a budget analyst dealing with nuclear energy policy at the White House. It was a secure and impressive career, but she wasn’t fulfilled by it. Then she saw an advert for a speciality food store called Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton Beach.

Ina had no professional experience running a food shop. She went to see it anyway and bought it in 1978. She was 30 years old. That decision fascinated me. We talk a lot in leadership about having the right experience before taking the next step, but sometimes you aren’t going to have it. At some point, somebody has to give you your first opportunity to do something, and occasionally that somebody needs to be you.

Ina didn’t know everything required to build Barefoot Contessa before she bought it. She learned. I think there’s a huge lesson in that.

Knowing when it’s time to do something different

One of the things I loved about Ina’s story is that she doesn’t reinvent herself once. She does it repeatedly. She went from government to running a food store. After building Barefoot Contessa for years, she sold the business. Then came cookbooks. Then television. What looks from the outside like one beautifully planned career was actually a series of decisions to leave something familiar and move into something she hadn’t done before.

Her first cookbook arrived in 1999, and Barefoot Contessa eventually became a hugely successful Food Network series. Ina has since written numerous bestselling cookbooks and won five Emmy Awards and a James Beard Award.

What I took from that wasn’t that everyone should dramatically quit their job and buy a shop in the Hamptons. It was the importance of recognising when you’ve stopped growing. There is security in being good at something you’ve done for years. There is also a danger in allowing that security to become the reason you never find out what else you could be good at.

The bit behind the beautiful life

This is also a much more vulnerable memoir than I expected. Ina writes about a difficult childhood and about the less-than-perfect periods in her marriage to Jeffrey. I think most people who know Ina Garten know Jeffrey too; their relationship has become part of the Barefoot Contessa world, and they appear to have this wonderfully supportive marriage. But it wasn’t always quite so simple.

When Ina was consumed with building Barefoot Contessa in the 1970s, their marriage reached a point where she asked Jeffrey for a separation. She has described needing a different kind of relationship, one in which she could be a businesswoman rather than being expected to fulfil a traditional role at home. They eventually reconciled and built a more equal partnership. That part hit me personally because I was going through my own divorce when I read the book.

My circumstances were completely different, but when you’ve been in a marriage that hasn’t worked out as you expected, you inevitably read somebody else’s reflections on relationships slightly differently. Ina’s honesty made me think about how relationships evolve alongside careers, ambitions and the people we become.

I appreciated that she included it because otherwise it would have been very easy for this memoir to become a parade of beautiful houses and career successes. Instead, you see some of what it took to create the life that now looks so effortless.

Build something that looks like you

There’s another leadership lesson in Ina’s career that I really like: she knows what her version of good looks like. Barefoot Contessa has a very distinctive identity. The food, the entertaining, the house, the garden, the flowers, even the way the television programmes feel, it all belongs to the same world. That doesn’t happen accidentally.

Ina built something around her own taste rather than constantly chasing whatever everybody else was doing. She understood what she wanted people to experience and then became incredibly consistent about delivering it. That’s brand leadership.

Whether you’re running a media company, a healthcare business, a restaurant or a team, knowing who you are matters. You can learn from competitors without becoming them. You can watch trends without chasing every one.

There is real confidence in building something distinctive and then protecting what makes it distinctive.

Take the risk — then do the work

The biggest thing I took from Be Ready When the Luck Happens is that Ina’s career contains plenty of fortunate moments, but very little passive waiting. She took risks, but then she worked incredibly hard to make those risks pay off. She learned what she didn’t know. She paid attention to detail. She made mistakes, adapted and kept moving.

I think we sometimes look at hugely successful people backwards. Once you know somebody as Ina Garten, bestselling author, television star, beautiful home in East Hampton, apartment in Paris, every earlier decision can start to look as though it was obviously leading there. It wasn’t.

The woman leaving a secure government career to buy a food shop she’d seen advertised couldn’t know that cookbooks, television programmes, Emmys and everything else would eventually follow. She just had to decide whether to take the next opportunity. Then she had to be ready for it.

About Ina Garten

Ina Garten is the bestselling author of 13 cookbooks and the longtime host of Barefoot Contessa, as well as Be My Guest. Her television work has earned her five Emmy Awards and a James Beard Award.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens was published in October 2024 by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. It was also selected as a notable or best book of the year by publications including The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

My verdict

★★★★★ 5 out of 5 stars.

I absolutely loved this book. It’s warm, funny, stylish and sometimes surprisingly emotional, but underneath all the lovely Ina Garten-ness is the story of a woman who repeatedly made brave decisions about what she wanted her life to become. For me, that’s why it belongs in the Leadership Library.

Leadership isn’t only about managing people or running companies. Sometimes it’s about having enough self-awareness to recognise that the life you’re living isn’t the one you want, enough courage to change direction and enough work ethic to make something of the opportunity when it arrives. Ina Garten makes success look wonderfully effortless. Be Ready When the Luck Happens shows you that it wasn’t.

If you’re contemplating a career change, building something of your own or simply wondering whether you’re brave enough to take a bigger swing at life, I’d read it. Preferably with champagne. The jacuzzi is optional.