Brave choice leads to chances of success

By Jin Yu-young

In 2010, Reshma Saujani was the icon of a successful woman: she was working at a big-name investment firm, had a high salary, and was at the peak of her career.

Despite all this, she was miserable and crumbling under the realization that finance no longer made her happy, and so she did the unthinkable by leaving her job to run for U.S. Congress.

Being a woman of color with no experience in the political sphere, Saujani was advised to withdraw her candidacy, as the odds were heavily stacked against her.

While most women in her position would have given up out of the fear of losing, she defiantly continued her campaign. Regardless of her severe defeat, Saujani regards this event as a personal success and a defining moment in which she chose to be brave over being perfect.

In 2016, she gave a TED talk titled, “Teach girls bravery, not perfection.”

The talk went viral with over 4 million views leading Saujani to write her book “Brave, Not Perfect.”

In both the talk and the book, she outlines the impossibly high standards that women are subject to on a daily basis (including beauty standards, levels of success, and the ability to be care-givers), and how the pressure to be perfect prevents them from making brave decisions. The book was recently translated into Korean by Lee Mi-jeong.

Saujani reveals the stark contrast in gender expectations, even at developmental years. “[Girls are] taught from a very young age to play it safe…to sit quietly and obediently, to look pretty, to be agreeable so we will be liked…boys are groomed to be adventurous.”

She explains in detail how education (at societal, domestic, and classroom levels) encourages boys to take risks and challenges while urging girls to be “nice, polite, and polished”.

It is this constant and demanding standard that influences girls and women to base their decisions on success rather than on personal happiness.

The author states, “so many women stick to doing only the things at which they excel, rarely going beyond what makes them feel confident and comfortable.”

She repeatedly demonstrates, however, that making brave choices will lead to not only increased self-satisfaction but also higher chances of success.

In the book, there are several cases of women following the textbook path of having a stable job, getting married, having kids, and becoming a nurturing mother. Many of them voice their regret in not having explored other career options and only having worked to achieve a societally deemed “perfect” life.

In the pursuit of perfection, many women place their mental and physical health on the bottom of the priority list, leading to high levels of stress and burnout.

Saujani emphasizes the importance of sleep, alone time, meditation, and exercise as key components of staying healthy.

She also helps women develop a braver mindset by encouraging them to go beyond their comfort zones and think of failure as part of a flexible process rather than a permanent consequence. By comparing bravery to a muscle, the author even shows the benefits of failure. “Every setback is just another chance to further strengthen those fierce bravery muscles you're building by getting back up and trying again,” she says.

Through her raw honesty and personal anecdotes, Reshma Saujani humanizes the universal difficulties that women face and empowers them to be brave in her book “Brave, Not Perfect.”

Jin Yu-young is a Korea Times intern.