You hit it square on the head. You said you didn’t think you’d be able to overcome all the awful things you’ve endured in your life, every setback, every naysayer, every tragedy. But then your strengths took over and you’re succeeding.

Now in “Nailing It” by Robert L. Dilenschneider, get more of the inspiration you need to hit the marks you’ve set.

It’s been a rough two years for most of us. For you, it’s seems longer but you’ve put one foot in front of the other anyhow because what else could you do? A lot, Dilenschneider says.

Our lives would be the lesser without the contributions of people who have come through fire and then turned up the heat. No matter what your age, you can enhance the world and here, he profiles 25 people to prove it.

Take Mozart, for example.

He was born a sickly child and never really shook that off. His father, also a musician, pushed young Mozart to excel. His mother gave him the room to explore, though that cost a lot of money. Still, despite those ongoing health issues, both physically and mentally, Mozart wrote more than 600 musical works in his lifetime.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was just 10 days old when her mother died. Her father married again a few years later, but Mary didn’t get along with her stepmother. Pregnant by a married man whose wife committed suicide over the indiscretion, Mary wed Percy Shelley, but their baby died soon afterward. Even with all this loss, Mary managed to write a masterpiece novel. You know it as Frankenstein.

Ulysses Grant’s “accomplishments came in middle age...”

Albert Einstein was a poor student and worked at a clerk’s desk, processing patent applications when he was a young man, which gave him a chance to think.

Elizabeth Kenney developed a treatment for polio as a young woman, at a time when doctors were mostly only men.

Branch Rickey helped Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in baseball.

And it took Maria Tallchief, a Native American dancer, 21 years to realize her ballet dreams.

You have lots of excuses and even more reasons. Now what you need is a boost to forget those things and reach for the top bunk instead. “Nailing It” will help you find that oomph.

There’s plenty of it to be had here, and each of the stories offers a different kind of roadblock, ending in varying types of inspiration. The author, who reminds readers he’s an adult white man, also mixes up the profiles well, representing many different races and nationalities so that readers can easily find fully-relatable tales.

Though this books’ subtitle indicates “twentysomethings,” there’s a wide variety of ages represented here, too.

Best of all, you don’t have to be in a doleful state to enjoy this book; it offers great biographies and plenty of interesting side-bars to hold a reader’s attention for a long time. Whether you want something breezy or boosting, “Nailing It” hammers both home.

Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.