Taurea Avant was in her early twenties, fresh out of Hampton University with a computer science degree and a $26,000 salary, when her father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given six months to live. He accepted it, and she watched him do it. "You can't really want something for somebody more than they want it for themselves," she told me. "He accepted the diagnosis of six months."
He lasted seven.
What stayed with her wasn't only the loss. It was one specific memory of her father on the phone with his coworkers, cancer having spread to his brain, too sick to ever return to work. He was missing his work and started to cry. Before then, Taurea had never seen her father cry. "To know that you're doing something you love…I hate what I do," she recalled thinking. "I know that I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to fully live my life."
That moment planted a seed. Not just the grief of losing him, but the sharper grief of watching someone who loved his work deeply not bet on himself enough to keep fighting. Taurea decided she would not make the same choice.
Her Next Move
After his death, Taurea used her father’s insurance payout to move from Virginia to Atlanta. No job or real plan, just a decision that she was going to figure it out.
In Atlanta, she built a web design business which was born, almost accidentally, out of something else she was already doing. Back in Virginia, she hosted a local TV show, interviewing celebrities and putting stories on a platform she taught herself to build.
She wanted to bring the idea to Atlanta, but soon realized that web design could be its own income stream. Her first client was a prominent Atlanta party promoter who eventually introduced her to someone in network marketing.
Taurea eventually moved into network marketing, and her computer science background kicked in even more. She ran it like code, identifying people with large spheres of influence, building systematic launch plans for every new team member, tracking numbers with precision. "I could even identify how much money I was going to make based on who I was launching that week," she said.
At her peak, she was earning around $400,000 a year. She had the $100,000 Mercedes Benz, shoes, jewelry, and community she called family. By every external measure, she’d made it.
Even through all the apparent success, something stood out to Taurea. "I'm marketing a company and not myself," she told me. "I'm building the brand for them and not for me, and I knew that something was going to have to shift." She was working nonstop for a company that didn't belong to her and for a community that, she would come to learn, was more conditional than she could imagine.
The Book Nobody Wanted Her to Write
In the middle of that success, Taurea decided to write a book. She didn't ask for permission, nor did she seek counsel from her upline. "I never ask for advice from someone who hasn't done the thing that I'm doing," she said. She just wrote it, A Six Figure Vision, originally titled A Vision of Freedom, and when it was finished, she told her leadership she’d written a book.
The response was swift and unexpected. At a leadership meeting, the executive vice president of sales called her out in front of everyone with a clear message: you can't be bigger than the platform. People who had been celebrating her went quiet, and the community she’d poured years into suddenly began treating her like a liability. So, she pulled back from pushing the book, and then, as if on cue, everything else began to unravel too.
Within a short stretch: she lost a close friend who’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer. Her grandmother got sick. Her top team member left the team, which caused her income to drop. And to top it all off, she had to keep her cool while her ex-boyfriend of five years paraded his new girlfriend at their business conferences.
“I have built up this business only to look around and be like, I ain't got a damn thing,” she said recalling her frustration. “I've worked so hard. I did all these things they told me to do. I got all the things they told me to buy, and I was just like, ‘this ain't it.’”
She was at a conference in Las Vegas, unable to afford a room at the MGM where her own event was being held. She sat in her hotel room and researched ways to end her life. But somewhere in that hotel room, through the fear and the grief, a question surfaced that she couldn't shake. "If I can't do it," she said, "then why am I here? I have to have a reason."
What the Book Started
That night, Taurea got on her knees, prayed, and made the decision to be done building someone else's platform. So, she went back to her book and designed a workshop called Show Your Success where she taught book writing, web development, and publishing.
When word got around in her network marketing circle about the workshop, they literally told people to not attend.
She had 61 people show up anyway.
"I'll never forget the number," she said about that accomplishment. "I offered a course for $500. Five people signed up. I made $2,500, and I kept 100% of it."
That first workshop built on the visibility strategy and book expertise she'd spent years developing was the beginning of everything. Not just a new business, but a new understanding of what the book had always been for her. It wasn't a recruiting tool or a side project. It was the foundation she'd been building toward all along. "I was happy," she said of her new beginning. "I was doing what I love to do. I wouldn't trade the feelings and the purpose work for anything else."
Today, Taurea is the co-founder of BookRich Profits Club, founder of Author All-Stars magazine, and architect of Book Profits Media. She has helped over 11,000 people become published authors, produced more than 60 collaboration books, and built a platform dedicated to one thing: showing authors how to leverage their books to get on stages, podcasts, billboards, and in publications. She is now building Vision Impact Center, an experiential event space rooted in the belief that a book launch shouldn't be an event. It should be an experience.
Every single part of Taurea’s big vision traces back to the book they told her not to write.
Steal Her Moves
Taurea didn't accidentally become the go-to person for 11,000 authors. She followed the thread from a TV show, to climbing the ranks in networking marketing, to a book they told her not to write, to a workshop nobody was supposed to attend.
Here are a few things worth carrying into your own journey:
Don't ask permission to build what's yours. Taurea didn't tell her upline she was writing a book, nor did she seek their counsel or wait for their blessing. She just built it. If you're waiting for someone else to validate what you already know you need to do, that permission isn't coming. And you don't need it.
Start building your own brand before you walk out the door. Taurea’s book wasn't written after she left network marketing. She wrote it while she was still earning, showing up, and smiling at conferences. By the time everything fell apart, she had one thing that belonged entirely to her. Whatever structure you're in right now, that's not a reason to wait. It might be exactly the right time to start.
Follow the thread, even when you can't name it yet. Taurea hosted a TV show before she knew she'd become a visibility expert. She taught herself web design to build a platform she'd eventually leave behind. She wrote a book she initially thought was a recruiting tool. None of it was wasted.
Don't let someone else's ceiling become yours. Taurea’s father accepted a six-month diagnosis. Her upline told her she couldn't be bigger than the company, and her network said don't go to her workshops. At every turn, someone drew a line around what was possible, yet she always managed to step past it.
That last one isn't just a lesson. It's Taurea’s signature move.
She decided that entrepreneurship, and eventually, that first book was her bet. They told her not to write it. She wrote it anyway, and the 11,000 authors who came after her are proof of what happens when you refuse to let someone else set the ceiling on what you're meant to do.
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