Forged From Fire (September 2025)

Amazon #1 New Release and Amazon top 15 Best Seller

What happens when success arrives, but life still breaks you open?

In this deeply personal memoir, Dr. Charles Thomas Jr. reflects on the layered experience of building and selling a company while navigating the challenges of mid-life, family illness, spiritual uncertainty, and the pressure to lead when nothing feels certain.

Told with unflinching honesty and emotional clarity, this is a story of effort, identity, and faith — not in a perfect outcome, but in the value of showing up. Through moments of failure and doubt, leadership and growth, Thomas explores the quiet resilience it takes to keep going when the weight of life and leadership collide.

This book is not a step-by-step business manual. It’s not about shortcuts or silver bullets. It’s a reflection on the long game. It’s a story about how personal discipline, meaningful relationships, self-awareness, and spiritual grounding can anchor us through success, struggle, and everything in between.

Part entrepreneurial narrative, part emotional reckoning, part love letter to those who keep going, this memoir is for anyone who has faced uncertainty, loss, or fear and chose to stay in the fight. It’s for those building something that matters, even if it costs them pieces of themselves along the way.

If you’ve ever chased a dream, questioned your calling, battled burnout, or simply tried to do good work while life comes at you fast, this story will meet you where you are.

This book is for anyone who lives with urgency and intention.
This book is for anyone who leads with heart and scars.
This book is for anyone who keeps going.
This book is for anyone who cannot quit and will not quit.
This book is for anyone who doesn’t stop when they’re tired, only when they’re done.
This book is for you.

Best Kept Secrets: From Invisible Walk-ons to Life Champions (August 2019)

Amazon #1 New Release and #1 Best Seller

Best Kept Secrets was written by an athlete for athletes and those with an athletic or personal development mindset. At the macro level, this book is for people who have felt or feel marginalized and/or ostracized because they aren’t the superstar in their respective space. At the micro and more personal level, Best Kept Secrets is a book by a walk-on, for walk-ons, about walk-ons, and the power that we possess to move from feelings of invisibility to life champions.

While the context of Best Kept Secrets highlights the sports journey, it is not only about sports. It is also about life. The life game we play is not for the weak. It is for the battle tested. It is for the courageous. It is for those who understand their why.

Transitioning from best kept secret to life champion is about more than throwing a ball through a hoop, lifting weights, running a ball into an end zone, kicking a ball into or hitting a ball over a net. The transition is about the journey from caterpillar to butterfly. In order to become a life champion, significant effort is required. Craftsmanship and personal mastery are foundational. The mandates to become artisans of our own fortunes, the best of the best, examples of human potential, and love personified are calls to action. Fear and love cannot live in the same place. To transition from best kept secret to life champion, a willingness to carry on despite the odds stacked against you is imperative.

Best Kept Secrets is an outpouring of love. This is a manifesto for my forgotten tribe members. This is a clarion call for athletes and non-athletes who aspire to summit their chosen mountains.

Leading Through Difficulty: The Darker Side of Workplace Behavior (December 2017)

If you are a new manager or experienced manager, new leader or seasoned leader, it is critical that you understand the various, often unspoken, elements of the darker side of workplace behavior. Your charm, charisma, intellect, network, bank account, and/or academic pedigree do not play a role in others’ desires to engage in objectionable behaviors within the workplace.

Deviant workplace behavior happens. It happens everywhere. It happens all the time. The darker side of workplace behavior does not solely afflict terrible managers and leaders. It is not a nebulous conception that fails to impact elite organizations. The simple fact that humans are a part of the equation means that deviant workplace behavior will occur, and will happen more than you think. When it comes to routine nonconformity and dysfunctional workplace behavior, an elusive but fundamental question remains: Why are some individuals within the workplace inclined to participate in the darker side of workplace behavior?

Breakthrough: Stories of Resilience Tragedy and Triumph (May 2017)

Amazon and Westbow Press Best Seller

Breakthrough: Stories of Resilience, Tragedy, and Triumph captures the lived experiences and collective wisdom of individuals from varied walks of life. The trials, tribulations, and battle scars that we all don are not meant to be hidden. They should be embraced and shared with the world. Life is but a fleeting moment. Regardless of how long we live, it will not be long enough. As such, it is advisable to smile, have fun, live, learn, enjoy the life journey as much as possible, and break through whatever is holding us back from being the best version of ourselves.

Throughout Breakthrough, you will have the blessed fortune to learn about and incorporate the wisdom of some remarkable human beings who have experienced a variety of breakthroughs in their lives, are enjoying their journeys, and are successful, based on their own definitions. You will receive advice that will dramatically amend your perspectives on success, achievement, philosophies of life, love, and leadership, and many of the principles necessary for the full engagement and active participation in your life journey. You will learn the elemental importance of not allowing who you are to stop you from becoming who you want to be. The stories and themes of hard work, failure, resilience, learning from others, asking for help, leading from where you are, etc., are most inspirational. I am confident that the insights provided within these pages will offer you value and help you as you prepare or continue to offer useful service as a servant to many.

Scars, Exile, and Vindication (August 2012)

Have I been sent to this earth by the Creator to challenge the very being and thought processes of others? Was I made to be a comet in a planet full of stars? Is it my duty to give other people a reason to believe, a sense of hope? Why do I ask so many questions and try to understand such complex issues? I do not know the answer to…these questions. What I do know, however, is that writing my story…gave me a deeper meaning into what this world has in store for all of us, and it gave me the opportunity to enrich lives and hopefully be a blessing to others.