I'm the daughter of refugees. The immigrant mentality is to work hard, be brave, and never give up in your pursuit of achieving the American dream.
I'm glad I didn't know how much patience entrepreneurship required. It took some time to turn that into a strength of mine, so that would've presented an obstacle when I was younger.
I refuse to see losing as a negative. Obama lost in '83 when he ran against Bobby Rush. Hillary lost in '08. Even Lincoln lost the first election. It's a useful learning experience.
I was full of pride when President Obama talked about coding in his last State of the Union address. I was proud when Chicago recently made computer science mandatory as a requirement for graduation. To see this elevate to the level of a bigger conversation is progress.
Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.
In the workplace, we're taught to worry about what happens if we don't have full, complete knowledge of every detail. But if you create a culture and an environment that rewards people for taking risks, even if they don't succeed, you can start changing behavior.
There's no better way of learning from your experiences than having an open and honest conversation with yourself about why you fell short.
For so long, women have been waiting to get recognized. The world doesn't work that way. We need to teach girls that it's OK to ask for what you want when it comes to your salary or whatever it is you want to enhance your career. No one is going to notice you no matter how amazing you are.
Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst.
If our American women are going to work to put food on the table and pay for the mortgage, then we better make sure that they get put into jobs that pay well and that pay their worth. That's why I'm such a huge advocate about computing jobs, because those are the jobs.
Computer science is not just for smart 'nerds' in hoodies coding in basements. Coding is extremely creative and is an integral part of almost every industry.
Some people worry about our federal deficit, but I, I worry about our bravery deficit. Our economy, our society - we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave. The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look.