Lisa Wang, former gymnast and CEO of SheWorks, talks about chasing perfection after missing the 2008 Olympics. She trained intensively in Russia, went to Yale and Wall Street, but kept feeling not good enough. She argues the fix is shifting from proving yourself to serving others and owning your failures.
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Hi, guys. So I am the CEO of SheWorks, which is a global platform that empowers about 20,000 female entrepreneurs. But that's not exactly what I'm going to be talking about today. Thank you. Has it ever crossed your mind, the questions or the thoughts, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not successful enough, I'm not rich enough, I don't have enough. I don't work hard enough. This is enoughness. The only dictionary definition of this word is the state or condition of being enough. Sufficiency or adequacy. Ironically, that definition isn't good enough. And I want to tell you a little story about perfectionism. OK. Perfection is something I've worked towards my entire life. As the daughter of immigrants, I understood the high stakes of failure. As a student, I straight— I slaved for straight A's, but especially as a national champion gymnast, I mastered the art of perfection, from pointed toes to perfect posture and always the perfect position. Perfection brought with it prestige and applause and perfect 10s, but— and it always felt good. Gymnastics gave me a stage upon which I could make other people proud and I could move people and I never had to say a single word. I was good at being perfect. I was hardworking. I was diligent. And so long as I kept my eye on the prize, My world was destined for perfection. By 2007, I had earned the champion— the title of 3-time US National Champion gymnast. And I had diligently checked off all of the boxes, from state champion to regional champion, national champion, Pan Am champion. And now here I was, nearly a decade later— At the World Championships, the qualifier for the ultimate prize, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. On that day, I got on the mat and I was ready to do my final routine. And I remember in that moment, suddenly, as the music crescendoed, so too did the volume of expectations in my head. I suddenly became hyper-aware of all of the faces in the crowd and the piercing gazes of the judges. And the pressure to achieve this decade-long dream. And they say all it takes is a flash of doubt. And on that day, doubt determined my fate. Sure, I had been champion for 3 years in a row, but on that day I stumbled and I missed qualifying for my Olympic dream by a mere 0.1 seconds. 0.25 tenths of a point. And in that moment, everything that I believed about myself shattered. I believed I wasn't good enough. I didn't work hard enough. I didn't prepare enough. I wasn't good enough, literally. And that's the insidious nature of perfection. Nothing is ever good enough. But on that day, I had to make a decision. And I had gotten an acceptance into my dream college, Yale University, that same week. And I was very tempted to just say, I'm just gonna quit and leave, forget about everything I've done for the past 10 years. But when I thought to myself, I said, I'm not a quitter, and I most definitely am not a loser. So I did the hardest thing that I knew possible, and I bought a one-way ticket to Russia, the Russian Olympic Training Center in Novogorsk, which is the most rigorous training center in the world. And I committed myself to becoming the best gymnast I could be, even though I didn't get my dream. And so for the next 9 months, I trained for 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. I would get up at 7 AM, have a pretty terrible breakfast of stale white bread and some tomatoes, and they'd weigh us in the morning, and then we'd train for 4 hours, take a quick nap, and you train for another 4 or 5 hours, get an ice bath, and do it all over again. 9 months later, I arrived at my last competition, which was the 2008 U.S. National Championships. And at that competition, I ended up winning every single gold medal and Athlete of the Year. And then now I said, peace, I'm out. I said I was moving on, but that's what I thought. I want to close that chapter of my life firmly because I never wanted gymnastics to define me. I never wanted that moment That failure to define me. And so I did everything in my power so that no one would think that I was that girl who was that gymnast and a once-was. And so I continued to pursue new passions. And the funny thing is that oftentimes the thing you most run away from is often the thing that is most important to face. Every time when the US— when the Olympics came on in 2012, and yes, even last year in 2016, I would turn on that TV and I would feel something inside, and I wouldn't understand why it still hurt to watch the Olympics. I would turn it off. And I would realize that no matter how tightly you shut that book, it's always a part of your story. And so the question is, how do you own these failures? How do you feel like you're enough? Because so many of us walk around with these feelings of inadequacy, whether privately or painfully, and we think that no one else sees it. But the truth is, we all carry this not-enoughness And it's often public. It shows up in the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you show up in a room, and inevitably the way others perceive you. And what I realized is that for a lot of us, there's this fear of failure. For those people who are looking to achieve, who have these big dreams, these big ambitions, But the thing is, when fear of failure drives us, every subsequent success becomes not something that we own, but yet another proving ground to do more and more and more. When I retired from gymnastics, I kept trying to prove to myself that I was good enough. I graduated from Yale. I had a— graduated with honors. I got a fancy job on Wall Street as a hedge fund analyst. I built a tech company. I raised money. I built another tech company. And still, when I walked into rooms, I was like, why do I not feel like I'm good enough? And what I realized is that I kept trying to fill this bucket up. With more and more and more external achievements, and it was a never-ending rat race. Because no matter how much I put in that bucket, I would always feel empty. And so the question is, maybe you do feel like this. A lot of us do. It transcends every race, every gender, every industry, every age. How do you get over it when you walk into a room and maybe you do feel like you're not good enough? Well, one of the things that I've learned to do is you stop focusing on yourself. Stop focusing on how other people will perceive you, and instead think about what is my duty to the people in this room? What is my duty to others? Is it to educate? To inspire. To motivate. Because when we show up as lesser versions of ourselves, we not only rob ourselves of our voices, we also rob others of the strength and value that we could be giving to them.
