Brave, Not Perfect: How Celebrating Imperfection Helps You Live Your Best, Most Joyful Life

"Reshma starts this book with her ‘perfect’ story. She’s a South Asian American who went to Harvard, then Yale Law School, and then on to a series of prestigious jobs. Everything she’s done is in the service of being perfect, but she’s never really taken a risk. Then, at 33, she does something incredibly brave. She runs for Senate and gets crushed. All of a sudden, for the first time, she has not only taken a risk, but she has failed. Publicly, and big time. So what does she do next? A few months after her Senate campaign (which, as a friend of her husband, I had supported), she called me and asked for a favour. She was working on an idea to start an organization that would help girls learn to code in high school, to start to destigmatize the idea that technology is for men. She asked if we could spare some office space for her burgeoning organization, and I said yes. That organization was Girls Who Code, which has now introduced hundreds of thousands of girls and young women to programming and technology. They have helped make technology something girls believe they can do and we now have computer science programmes in college that are more than 50% women. At Princeton, computer science is now the largest major. That’s incredible. Think about the impact now, ten years later, of Reshma’s bravery—not just of starting the organization but of making phone calls to people she barely knew, asking for help. Reading this book reminds us that women are often held to an unreasonable standard of perfection. Going back to entrepreneurship, both for Brave not Perfect and Lean In , these are successful, brilliant women helping us understand what it feels like to be a woman in business and how brave you have to be and how hard it is to get a seat at the table. I think that’s really inspiring for me personally, but also for a lot of women who are afraid of taking that step and doing something out of the box. Reshma’s now stepped down as CEO of Girls Who Code to start an organization called Moms First , fighting an even harder battle around getting childcare for all in the United States. Unlike many other democracies, we dramatically underfund childcare, something moms need to be successful at work. When companies don’t support childcare and parental leave, they’re not supporting women. That support isn’t just financial, it’s also about a culture that puts moms and families first. If you take one thing away from this interview, it’s that building a great company means making everyone successful at work—and especially women. Yes, can you imagine starting a programme like that, that goes national and has tens of millions of dollars of funding? It’s an incredible achievement. It’s the same impossible thing that Ben would have looked at and said, ‘You’ve got a one-in-a-thousand shot at success.’ And she did it. I think our society has a deep justice problem. I don’t think there’s a lot of justice in the sense that as a white, cis, straight, tall, middle-class, college-educated man with two parents, I have all the advantages in terms of starting a company. Where does funding go? It goes to white men, to be honest. When you join a company, odds are if you join a company run by a white dude you’ll get more money and more chances, and that becomes a cascading advantage throughout a career. Men get promoted more, especially tall white men. I don’t think there’s justice in that. Now, if you’re comparing two tall white men, and asking, ‘Who’ll have the better chance?’ I do think grit, self-awareness, emotional maturity, technical knowledge and those things play into it. But I don’t think many people would say there’s justice in the way we run an entrepreneurial system. It’s why I want to highlight people like Sheryl Sandberg who, while one of the most successful women in the history of technology, was not the CEO of Facebook. And I want to highlight Reshma, who is one of the most impressive and influential women in and around the technology sector. She should be a household name even though her organizations are non-profits and not worth billions. A world where women raise 50% of venture capital and have 50% of board seats and are 50% of the CEOs of public and private companies—that would be justice. Or at least a start."