Stacey Abrams has gone where no one who looks like her has gone before. With her May 22 Democratic primary win in Georgia, she became the first black woman to capture a major party’s nomination for governor. If elected this November, she will become the first black woman governor in the United States.

In a Facebook post following her primary victory, Abrams said: “We proved that an unmuted voice can shake the foundations of an ‘immutable’ status quo. We showed the nation that there is power in our voices, and there is power in our feet.”

Abrams, 44, has a made a career of challenging the status quo. She mined those experiences and lessons to write Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change. Published a month before her Georgia primary, the book is the usual inspirational campaign biography, but also takes the form of a how-to manual for those traditionally sidelined from power seeking to embrace ambition and leadership.

Her call to action is a timely one. It has been half a century since former U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a New York Democrat, became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, and yet people of color remain sorely underrepresented in elected office. According to the Pew Research Center, non-white Hispanics and other racial minorities make up 38 percent of the nation’s population but only 19 percent of the current Congress—and that’s the highest level of representation. For black women, the numbers in both state and federal office show only meager gains since Chisholm’s groundbreaking election.

As outlined in “The Chisholm Effect,” a recent report from the Center for American Women in Politics and Higher Heights, there are 19 black women in Congress, constituting 3.6 percent of all members of Congress. In state legislatures, black women are 3.7 percent of all seats. That’s up from 2.3 percent in 1998. Only 12 black women have ever held statewide elected executive offices, such as attorney general, secretary of state, or treasurer.

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“This year, we should all be buoyed by the Chisholm effect, which spawned generations of black women determined to and successful at breaking political glass ceilings,” Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, writes in the foreword to “The Chisholm Effect.” “There’s an opportunity in the coming months for black women to build on these gains by taking decisive action to increase our political representation and provide America with leadership that is powerful, connected, and lasting.”

Abrams may well benefit from that opportunity, although Republicans have won the Georgia statehouse the last four elections. But she has beat expectations before. A graduate of the Yale Law School, she left private practice in Atlanta to become a deputy city attorney, and after winning a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, became its first black woman minority leader. In Minority Leader, she describes how at each juncture she often was told that she wasn’t ready or that it wasn’t her turn, especially when she decided to run for governor.

She won the primary over Stacey Evans, a state legislator backed by some key Georgia power brokers. In her victory post on Facebook, Abrams thanks all those who “believed that a little black girl who sometimes had to go without lights or running water—who grew up to become the first woman to lead in the Georgia General Assembly—could become the first woman gubernatorial nominee from either party in Georgia’s history.”

“There are few how-to guides to help those of us who are ‘other’ to become the ones in charge,” Abrams explains in Minority Leader. “Power and leadership are hard, and it’s especially difficult for those who start out weighed down by stereotypes and lack of access... I have learned how to seize opportunity, how to plan for victory and for defeat, and how to acquire, hold, and wield power, and I wrote this book to share what I’ve learned and the strategies I employed.”

Here are 15 of those takeaways: