7

FLIPPING OFF FAILURE

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

—J.K. ROWLING

“IF YOU HAVEN’T FAILED YET, you haven’t tried anything,” Reshma Saujani, forty, tells me matter-of-factly as we sit in a small, nondescript conference room in New York at the Girls Who Code office, where she is the founder and CEO. Reshma knows what it’s like to fail, and to fail publicly. In 2010, at thirty-three years old, Reshma ran in the Democratic primary in New York City, making headlines as the first Indian-American woman to run for a Congressional seat. Passionate, whip-smart, and camera-ready, Reshma raised money, got good press, and won support from influencers in New York’s business and tech world but ultimately lost in a landslide to the popular incumbent, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. “It was humiliating,” Reshma says. “I felt like I let people down.”

Reshma hangs her feelings of failure out there for all to inhabit. It’s a slice of her story that has teachable moments, but Reshma is no cautionary tale. While she embraces failure as part of her journey, grit and determination are arguably the more potent pieces. After all, this is a woman who applied to Yale Law School three times before getting accepted. Not surprisingly, the fear of failing didn’t stop Reshma from rebounding—in this case, running again for office. Three years later, after serving in the appointed position of New York City Deputy Public Advocate, Reshma ran for Public Advocate. She lost that race too. The fact that things don’t come easily for Reshma doesn’t deter her. In fact, it’s part of her narrative. She expects an uphill battle, and like her role model Hillary Clinton, she is prepared to fight the good, hard fight.

THREE TIMES IS THE CHARM

“I never get things the first time or the second time—more like the third or the fourth time,” Reshma says. In fact, it was Hillary Clinton’s concession speech in the 2008 Presidential election that inspired Reshma to leave her job on Wall Street as a hedge fund lawyer and first run for Congress. Reshma says that when Hillary was addressing thousands of supporters in Washington, DC, she felt like Hillary was speaking directly to her.

“It would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours,” Hillary Clinton had told the cheering crowd. “Always aim high, care deeply about what you believe in, and when you stumble, keep faith, and when you’re knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says that you can’t or shouldn’t go on.”¹

The words resonated.

“She said just because I failed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try,” Reshma says.

Despite the pollsters’ bleak odds for Reshma winning the Congressional seat in 2010, she went for it anyway. She desperately wanted to serve. The daughter of political refugees expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in 1972, Reshma grew up in Illinois, painfully aware of the need for social justice and cultural diversity. With a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, Reshma has the pedigree for politics and from an early age was leading movements to increase diversity awareness. She says that she led her first march when she was twelve years old.

While losing races was miserable, what she saw on the campaign trail—the lack of girls with access to computer science classes in New York City public schools—sparked a passion in Reshma. What had begun as a campaign promise to increase computer science education became the nonprofit Girls Who Code, which Reshma launched in 2012. Its mission is to close the gender gap in technology. With help from Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook, Girls Who Code provides free computer science education to low-income girls across the country. Its ambitious goal is to get one million girls coding by 2020. “If you asked me ten years ago if I would be a nonprofit leader, I would say absolutely not. It was not something that I had aspired to do,” Reshma says. “If you asked me if I would be running an organization that would be closing the gender gap in computer science, I would have probably laughed because I’m not a coder. In many ways, it was the other choices I made that didn’t work out that led me to this place.”

And getting to this place was not easy.

“After I lost my first Congressional race, I bounded upwards. I was looking for what the next opportunity was,” Reshma says. “But after losing Public Advocate, that was pretty painful. I did everything I wanted to do, and I had the right narrative, and I just didn’t win. I was like, damn, maybe I’m just not electable. Maybe there isn’t another race.”

Recovering from Failure

The political was also personal and the campaign took a brutal toll. Reshma wasn’t only running a campaign, she was also trying to get pregnant. She had two miscarriages during her run for Public Advocate and suffered another miscarriage earlier. “One of the things that kept me going was I didn’t want to get lost in my own grief and get broken,” Reshma says. “When you fail, you can become broken and never recuperate, and I think that’s what women are afraid of. What if I try this and it doesn’t work out, and what if I never recover?”

Now the mom to a ten-month-old son, Shaan, Reshma is keenly self-aware and reflective about how she handles and processes both failure and recovery. She’s learned it’s the picking yourself back up that keeps you going. “That fear of never being able to recover makes some women not try at all. I practice recovery. I now know that if something bad happens to me, what I need to do for myself is to recover and move on. I know that failure won’t break me,” she says. Reshma even has a protocol for grieving after a failure. She has rituals. People often ask her how she handled losing two elections and applying to Yale Law School three times. “We go to India to this ashram and drink a lot of booze and complain and go over every little thing that happened, what I could have done differently,” Reshma says. “It’s three months and then I’m done, and I don’t move back into the past. I think giving yourself a finite time to grieve and to mourn and then to pick yourself up and move forward is really important.”

Don’t Teach Perfect, Teach Brave

Reshma is no doubt charging forward. She has been recognized as one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40” and has earned accolades as one of Wall Street Journal’s “Innovators” and one of Adweek’s “Young Influentials.” And in February 2016, Reshma gave a TED Talk about how we need to teach girls to be brave and take risks, rather than be perfect. Reshma’s experience running for office inspired her book, Women Who Don’t Wait in Line: Break the Mold, Lead the Way. The book speaks about the importance of embracing risk and failure and how women need sponsors—people who can help women rise through the ranks. Reshma says she was shocked by the reaction she received from many women during her Congressional race who were upset that she would dare run against another woman. “The idea of waiting your turn and waiting for the big welcome mat—I believe this is what holds women back,” Reshma says. “The fact that I decided I wanted to run rather than someone tapping me to run is what leads women to not ask for raises, and to not take double steps in their careers, and to not take risks.”

It’s a Mindset, Not a Skillset

Taking risks and showing resilience and grit is what Reshma believes is fundamental for women and for the next generation of girls. Success, she believes, is less about skill and more about mindset. “I’ve been a lawyer, a candidate, I’ve worked in government, I’m a nonprofit leader—I’ve done fifty thousand different kinds of things, and I don’t have the training to do any of those things,” Reshma says. “I didn’t go to a school to launch a nonprofit or school to become a candidate. I think having a mindset that you can do anything and step up to any challenge, along with the fake-it-until-you-make-it idea, is really important.”

Reshma says that her failures got her to where she is today. Running for office prepared her to run a business. Enduring scrutiny helped her to develop even tougher skin. “There is nothing more frightening than being a candidate,” Reshma says. “You are being judged by all the things that we as women hate. You have to talk about yourself and brag about yourself and convince people to vote for you. And you get beat up every day.”

Now Reshma’s mission is supporting other women. She says that sponsorship is the new feminism. We owe it to each other to pull each other up. “Our generation is different because I don’t feel like we believe that there is only one spot for one woman,” Reshma says. “I don’t think we are as competitive with one another, because we feel like there is plenty of room for all of us. We have to be unabashed about supporting other women and be generous about opening up our networks to them.”

Like Amina Sow and her Tech LadyMafia in chapter 3 and Rachel Sklar with Change the Ratio and TheLi.st in chapter 4, Reshma sees the importance of lifting women, sharing her network of contacts, and women actively encouraging one another. In essence, our collective future hinges on our supporting the sisterhood. Having flipped failure on its head, Reshma describes Girls Who Code as being “like unicorns and rainbows.” She says that she’s seen the best parts of humanity in people coalescing to help girls. After her failed battles for public office, you may think that Reshma would be surprised that she has successfully landed, but she’s not.

“Sometimes success is easy. I’m used to fighting for things, but this has not been one of those things,” Reshma says. “It wasn’t novel; it was really obvious and there were other people who were in the space. Sometimes it’s the right idea at the right time.”

But if timing is everything (or at least a chunk of it), perhaps Reshma landed exactly where she needed to be at just the right moment. It wasn’t magical. She saw a need, had a passion to help solve the problem, built an organization, and had the support of influential members of the tech community—a community she had cultivated when she was running for office. Reshma wanted to effect change, and she’s doing it. “I’m unique in the nonprofit space because I’m impatient,” Reshma says. “I want to move fast.”

WEB THERAPY

Bea Arthur, thirty-one, is a charismatic African American woman with a name she calls a “happy accident.” She wasn’t named for the actress of Golden Girls and Maude fame, but for her father’s professor who coincidentally resembled the American TV star. “I tell people that the woman I was named after was actually a tall, mannish white woman,” she says with a laugh. Bea embraces the association with the other Bea Arthur because, living in New York City’s Chelsea area (with its population of gay men known for adoring the Golden Girls), she says she is asked about her name all day, every day. “I love it. I’m like an old cranky Jewish woman from Miami on the inside,” Bea says.

But this Bea Arthur comes off as anything but cranky. People are immediately attracted to her huge smile and contagious energy. Born in Houston and one of five kids, Bea says she inherited her entrepreneurial spirit from her parents. Bea’s father has a PhD in public health and was the head of immunization for the City of Houston’s health department. He recently retired and bought a cassava farm in Ghana to create an import/export business in glucose syrup. Bea’s mom started a personal health care business when Bea was in seventh grade. They now have twelve personal care homes in the Houston area.

Bea earned a dual master’s degree from Columbia University in counseling and clinical psychology and is a licensed mental health counselor. To qualify for a license, she spent nearly five years slogging away in Medicaid centers working with drug addicts, which she found exhausting. Then Bea moved to FEGS Center for Women and Families in its domestic violence division. She loved the work and the dynamic of working with all women. It was there that Bea realized that therapy should be accessible, affordable, and anonymous for everyone: “I figured all of our other dirty secrets are on the Internet, why not therapy? People are always so curious about therapy and want to try it, but there is always so much stigma. I thought: Let’s have fun with the stigma.”

Bea’s vision was to make therapy something empowering and even preventative. Don’t wait until you’re in crisis to get healthy; make it part of your routine. She had read about a place in Japan where you go and buy ceramic plates and cups and then break them to relieve stress. They clean them up and you leave. Bea loved that concept and wanted to create an environment where therapy was invigorating—you get it out of your system, find relief, and carry on. Regular sessions would keep you balanced and healthy, like going to the gym. And making it personal, affordable, and easy to access was the key. “Therapy is seen as something for weak people, but I wanted it to be a powerful thing,” Bea says. “I wanted to create a monthly model, like a gym membership. I stay away from the term mental health—it sounds too much like mental illness. People think therapy is for people with too many problems or too few problems, but there is a huge middle.”

Play Dates Gone Bust

This was Bea’s second attempt at a business. A few years earlier, while she was babysitting to make extra money, Bea realized that many of the stay-at-home moms she met (former high-flying career women) were suddenly lonely and eager for adult conversation. This led Bea to create Me Too, a space on the Upper East Side for women to have “adult play dates” while their children were occupied with childcare in the same brownstone. Bea found an investor to support her business, but her timing was off. It was 2007, and the economy was collapsing. The well-to-do at-home moms who were paying Bea’s $500 monthly fees were exactly the ones whose husbands were losing their jobs in the financial industry. The cost of renting a brownstone was not sustainable, and within three months Bea’s business fell apart.

“I hadn’t told anyone about it. I was super-secretive. When it failed, I was lonely and depressed. I should have seen a therapist, but I didn’t want to because I was in so much credit card debt,” Bea says.

The irony struck her. As a therapist, she couldn’t afford the help she needed. “I’m a practitioner in the space, and I thought how much harder it must be for the average person who couldn’t afford therapy even if they wanted to,” Bea says.

Pretty Padded Room

Bea’s experience inspired Pretty Padded Room, an online destination to find and receive therapy that is accessible and affordable for everyone. In February 2011, while still working at FEGS Center for Women and Families, Bea launched the company with five other therapists. They each had a specialty, their own distinctive “superpower,” as she calls it. Bea was targeting Millennials and created a concept she thought was cheeky and inviting. Even the name, Pretty Padded Room, played with the stigma of therapy. The idea was that you could first get to know the therapists by watching videos about them. It would be personal and easy. She wanted to show that therapy wasn’t just for those in acute crisis, but could also be helpful for everyone during life transitions.

They started with free sessions and immediately got some great press. But Bea couldn’t afford to quit her day job. She was working during the day and would go to Brooklyn each night to write copy and wireframe her site. She says that she became skilled and strategic at driving her own press because she couldn’t pay anyone to do it for her. Bea also mastered the power of networking and leveraging other women’s social feeds. “I learned how to piggyback on other people’s audiences and to get other people to vouch for you,” Bea says. “If it’s in line with their brand and mission and it’s not a direct competitor, it just makes sense.”

Bea was a therapist, not a coder. She had never worked at a tech company and had no experience with building websites. But she quickly realized that her counseling business was rooted in technology, and she needed to learn the tools of the tech world. “I never thought about it as being a start-up,” Bea says. “I grew up with entrepreneurs, so I just thought I was running a counseling company. But it turned out that I was running a tech platform with no experience in programming and no team and a broken site. Our video didn’t work for the first fourteen months, but I knew that we had something because people were trying to sign up.”

Swimming with the Sharks

Bea was also hustling for money and investors. She appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2013, hoping to get funding for Pretty Padded Room. The reality TV show experience was demoralizing. Bea says the day she taped it remains one of the worst days of her life.

“Being on that show was like walking down an alley and getting jumped,” Bea says. “Nothing can prepare you for that level of personal attacks. It was surreal. Imagine five people criticizing the most important business meeting of your life. They asked me if I went to college. It was relentless. They had to work hard to be that mean. After I taped the show, if I was awake or alone, I was crying.” Bea didn’t get the Sharks’ backing, but the feedback from the show forced her to figure out what her business was lacking.

Two years later, Bea was accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley. Bea was not only the first African American woman, but also one of the few women to join this exclusive boys club, an elite accelerator boot camp known for churning out the next big tech company. Silicon Valley was another shock. While it was a tremendous entrepreneurial journey for Bea, it also highlighted the enormous gender chasm that exists in the tech world when it comes to being taken seriously and raising money. Bea found that gender, not color, was the bigger barrier to entry.

“If you’re a black guy, they think, that’s cool. With women they just see this as a lifestyle company. It’s crazy because 98 percent of start-ups fail, so you are defending this discrimination on a formula that isn’t even working,” Bea says. “Ever since I entered the realm of investors, it’s really pissed me off. I’m from Texas; my family is from Ghana. I’m from two very patriarchal cultures, and I’ve never felt as dismissed and as discriminated against as a woman since I’ve been on the start-up scene. And then there’s the sexual harassment. There are a lot of games, and people don’t take you seriously. They think, ‘Keep it up girl, you’re really scrappy, good for you.’ I’ve hustled for every dime of the half million I have raised.”

Three months with Y Combinator during the summer of 2014 gave Bea the tools to truly develop her business. She learned to think differently about how to scale and grow her company. The program teaches you to work toward where you want to grow, and hire and behave as if you’re leveling up. You operate from a place of power—a very alpha mentality. While at Y Combinator, Bea renamed her company to In Your Corner. Men, she says, never related to the ironically named Pretty Padded Room.

In February 2015, Bea had her official relaunch with the new name. The experience was overwhelmingly stressful. A couple of bad hires resulted in her wasting money and time. Her website wasn’t functioning properly. She was losing momentum and faith from investors. She was also losing her mind. “I was powerless over my own products,” Bea says. “It was a purgatory of panic attacks, and there was nothing I could do about it. There is a lot of talk about depression in the start-up space. There’s a lot of pressure. You are paying attention to false rewards and getting caught up in the attention and excitement.”

Bea’s blunt honestly is refreshing. The fairy-tale of the successful start-up dominates the media. While the stories of twenty-something founders with quirky ideas that turn into massive payoffs are what we hear, the reality is often much more bleak. The struggles that founders face are daunting; add being a woman in the tech space and it’s even a tougher climb.

As a coach and therapist, Bea often shares advice and the lessons she’s learned with other women about how to create their own businesses and take leaps forward.

“You have to be aggressive, shameless, and fearless if you want to start your own company,” Bea says. “You can’t be scared of being embarrassed. You can’t be scared of failing.”

Sometimes You Can’t Beat the Odds

A year after we first talk, Bea posts a heartfelt message on her Facebook page. She announces that after five exhilarating and exhausting years, she’s taking down In Your Corner. The company is folding. I can feel every ounce of Bea’s emotion wrapped up in her poignant post. She’s been profiled as the glamorous “Beyoncé of Tech” for Forbes, exalted in ELLE magazine as a “Woman in Tech to Watch,” and in Fast Company as “The Comeback Kid.” She has spoken on panels, at conferences, and on TV. Bea even appeared in The Limited’s fall 2015 apparel campaign about innovative women. And yet, the odds of creating a sustainable start-up are still stacked against her. Despite turning a profit, year after year, Bea can’t get the funding she needs to keep her business going.

Bea and I meet two weeks after she posted her Facebook message.

“I’m sitting shiva,” Bea says with a smile, using the term for the Jewish period of mourning. She seesaws between being lighthearted and feeling like her heart is being ripped out. When Bea was in San Francisco the summer of 2014 after she completed Y Combinator, a well-known female investor and founder invited her to brunch in her palatial backyard in Palo Alto. Bea was excited; she had just finished the program and was eager for advice from a female mentor. Instead, she got a warning. “I really like you, but it’s not going to work out for you here,” Bea says the woman told her. “You can’t do the big-dick swagger and be cocky about your revenue. You’re non-technical, you’re black, you’re a woman, you have a really cute name, your company has a cute name. It’s just not going to work out.”

Sadly, Bea feels there was truth to those words. The odds of any start-up succeeding are remote—but for a woman in tech, the obstacles are staggering. They often can’t raise the money they need. Ironically, they aren’t taken as seriously as the boys in their hoodies. The gender discrimination is well known and pervasive.

A 2015 study published by CraigConnects (an organization created by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to use tech to empower under-recognized groups) and Women Who Tech (whose goal is to promote women-led start-ups) found that only 7 percent of venture capital money goes to women-led start-ups, even though women bring a 35 percent higher return on investment when venture-backed than male-run start-ups. Another interesting nugget: Female entrepreneurs bring in 20 percent more revenue with 50 percent less invested. And yet, women can’t get the funding that they need.²

As we eat lunch, Bea’s phone beeps with text messages. She has job offers. Some of the most connected people in tech are reaching out to her. But she doesn’t know if she wants to be someone else’s employee—at least no time soon. Bea wants to stay true to her passion and mission of helping others. She still believes that therapy is something that should be available to everyone, whether through a mobile, digital, or good old-fashioned in-person experience.

“Failure is like a redirect for the universe,” Bea says. “I did way more than I ever thought I would accomplish when I was at FEGS making $38,000 a year as a domestic violence counselor. Over the past few weeks, it’s felt like my heart was gasping for air, but I know there are lots of good things on the horizon.”

THE FAILURE FETISH

Embracing failure is an idea that has become fetishized in Silicon Valley. With an estimated nine out of ten start-ups flaming out within a few years, failure is as universal to the Valley experience as relentless optimism. Believing that they are working on the next big thing that will transform the world keeps those in the start-up space grinding away, even if the staggering odds of success are against them. But that is the beauty of the culture of innovation. An environment that encourages risk ultimately creates change.³

Failure wasn’t always so fashionable. The tech world used to bury its dead without much fanfare. Companies folded quietly. Founders whose businesses flopped got rescued and hired by friends. But then something changed. In 2009, Cassandra Phillipps, an event production planner who had entered the start-up scene in San Francisco, grew tired of pretending that everything with her social media business was perfect. She launched Fail-Con, an event where entrepreneurs could share their stories of epic fails, the lessons they learned, and the emotional roller coaster they experienced. This was Cassandra’s way of making it real—ripping off the façade of the founder myth that everything was fabulous.

Cassandra had felt that wherever she went, people would boast about their successes and talk about how great things were going and how pleased their investors were with their company’s growth. But that wasn’t Cassandra’s experience. Her company was floundering. She was depressed. She longed for support. “I would go to the events and everyone was so positive, and I felt like I had to do the same thing or I would be kicked out of the community,” Cassandra says. “It felt like you were a failure if you were having problems. You couldn’t ever be honest about how you were doing. It made me feel like personally I was a failure. I wondered why everyone around me was doing so well. I felt like we couldn’t discuss it in this environment.” So she changed the environment.

The FailCon event was a safe space to share what went wrong. When it launched in 2009, it was a huge success, with nearly five hundred people at the inaugural event. It quickly grew to more than twenty events around the world. Now the once-quiet funerals of start-ups have loud platforms where people can publicly mourn and broadcast their experiences. It became trendy for entrepreneurs to post their postmortems on blogging platforms like Medium with essays like “First Start-Up. First Flop.” Some even saw it as strategic, announcing their failure as a way to look for another job. It’s like advertising: “Hey, I did all of this great stuff, but it didn’t work out. I’m seasoned, I failed, hire me!”

Fail Fast + Fail Forward

Aside from owning failure as a professional bragging right, the “fail fast” mantra is often cited as a popular business technique of the tech industry. The idea is that many products aren’t fully baked before prototypes are released to the public. Think Gmail: It was released internally to Google employees in 2007 and then released to the public a few years later. These are known as the beta versions. The tech world is obsessed with speed and getting first to market. The expectation is that nothing you initially launch is perfect—it doesn’t need to be. It’s not about perfection; it’s about acting quickly. Companies try out products for people to test. What sticks they keep, what doesn’t they toss. It’s a learning experience. They improve on features, they tweak, they iterate, they adjust, just so.⁴

This model—risk, act, fail, and iterate—is equally useful to our careers. Many psychologists will point to experiencing failure as a valuable step in the journey to success. It’s a critical learning tool, because it forces you to dig into your own reservoir of grit. It tests your perseverance and ultimately can make you stronger. “Failure really can be an asset if we are trying to improve, learn, or do something new. It’s the feature that precedes nearly all successes. There’s nothing shameful about being wrong, about changing course. Each time it happens we have new options. Problems become opportunities,” writes Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.⁵

Talk to anyone in the midst of failure, and they’ll say it’s messy and awful. There is plenty of pushback now about how glorifying failure masks the horrible reality of the toll a tanking company takes on its founders. But for women, there is something to be learned from the start-up culture that takes the stigma out of failing and encourages risk—confidence. In chapter 2, we discussed how the proven way to gain confidence is to take action. Even in failure, you’ve acted. You’ve taken risks. You’ve learned. And out of failure comes growth. “We’ve come to see the theory of failing fast as the ideal paradigm for building female confidence,” write Kitty Kay and Claire Shipman in The Confidence Code. “If we can embrace failure as forward progress, then we can spend time on the other critical confidence skill: mastery.”⁶

DEVELOP A GROWTH MINDSET

Both Reshma and Bea have what best-selling author and Stanford professor Dr. Carol Dweck would call a “growth mindset.” As the name suggests, growth mindset states that intelligence and learning aren’t fixed but instead are malleable and can develop. This growth mindset versus fixed mindset has become very trendy in progressive education and parenting circles over the past decade. A cousin to iteration, it’s also been embraced as an integral part of the start-up world. And experts argue that it can predict an entrepreneur’s ability to succeed or fail. Fixed mindsets see failure as lack of innate ability—it means you’re not smart or talented and you’re not fulfilling your potential. Failure makes the fixed mindset person fearful of taking risks, whereas people with a growth mindset don’t measure their failures by their own fixed traits. They bounce back more easily. They recognize the value in what they learned, even if they failed. They are more resilient. They see success as a combination of luck with hard work and persistence. And they see failure as having teachable moments. “The number one ingredient in creative achievement is having a growth mindset,” writes Dr. Dweck in her best-selling book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.⁷

Dr. Dweck had long been obsessed with how people cope with failure when she started doing research on children many years ago and found that some kids really stepped up their game when they were challenged, while others did not. In her book, Dweck shows how her findings on dealing with failure can help parents raise kids by rewarding grit and perseverance. And the byproduct of those traits, not surprisingly, is confidence. The view you embrace, Dweck argues, profoundly effects how you lead your life.⁸

Reshma Saujani’s failures didn’t hold her back; they pushed her forward. As Reshma says, no one taught her how to run a campaign, to be a candidate, or to be the leader of a nonprofit. She tried, failed, tried again, learned, and grew. And this is the recipe for success. It’s the risk-taking that leads to growth that leads to success. Some people are more intuitively programmed to embrace the growth mindset, while others need to actively adopt the approach. Not winning political office didn’t stop Reshma from pursuing a mission to close the computer science gender gap. She lost her quest for political office, but she moved forward by creating a meaningful nonprofit that is changing the lives of thousands of girls across the country. Arguably, in her position today, Reshma may be making more of a difference than if she had won political races.

Two weeks after shutting down her company, Bea Arthur isn’t exactly sure of what she will do next. But she too has the growth mindset of someone who won’t become paralyzed because her company didn’t survive. She swam with the sharks on Shark Tank, rebounded, launched a company against the odds, and positively impacted people’s lives with her therapy site. Bea knows that her passion for connecting and helping people will still be part of her future. She believes in the strength of who she is and knows her capabilities and also what she doesn’t do as well. “No one can fire you from your gift,” Bea says. “Nobody can fail or not fund your gift. I was made for this. I do believe I have these gifts, and I feel very, very strongly about that.”