Brave, Not Perfect

**Author:** Reshma Saujani **Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

Why the pursuit of perfection is holding you back, how society trained you to play it safe, and practical strategies for building bravery in every area of your life.

This book is for anyone who has ever held back from raising their hand, applying for a job they wanted, speaking up in a meeting, or pursuing a dream because they were afraid of failing. It is especially for women who feel exhausted by the constant pressure to be flawless, agreeable, and endlessly accommodating.

Reshma Saujani was thirty-three years old when she did the bravest thing she had ever done. She ran for United States Congress. She lost. Badly. The year was 2010, and Saujani, a lawyer and activist with an impressive resume, challenged a well-established incumbent in a New York City district. The political establishment dismissed her. Donors were skeptical. Pundits called her naive. And on election night, she received only 19 percent of the vote. By every conventional measure, the campaign was a spectacular failure. She had poured years of her life into the effort, raised millions of dollars, and endured relentless public scrutiny, all to lose by a landslide. Most people assumed she would retreat from public life, embarrassed by the defeat. Instead, something unexpected happened. In the aftermath of her loss, Saujani found herself feeling strangely liberated. She had done the thing that terrified her most, and she had survived. The world did not end. Her career did not collapse. She was not permanently disgraced. In fact, she felt more alive and more clear about her purpose than ever before. This experience planted the seed for what would become Girls Who Code, the nonprofit organization Saujani founded to close the gender gap in technology. It also planted the seed for this book. In the years after her campaign, Saujani began noticing a pattern in the young women she met through her work. She saw brilliant, talented girls who were terrified of making mistakes. She watched them hesitate to raise their hands in class unless they were absolutely certain of the answer. She observed them abandoning coding projects the moment they encountered difficulty, apologizing for their imperfect work, and shrinking from challenges that might expose their limitations. At the same time, she noticed something different about the boys. They raised their hands even when they had no idea what to say. They dove into coding projects with reckless enthusiasm, unbothered by bugs and errors. They treated failure as a natural part of the process, not as a reflection of their worth. This observation led Saujani to a question that would shape the rest of her career: What if the real…