77. Pick Courage, not Perfect
I thought being perfect at school would save me. It didn’t!
Eve Cornwell, one of my favourite StudyTubers, once mentioned a phrase from a TED Talk that has stayed with me: pursue bravery over perfection.
In her Ted Talk, Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, argues that “most girls are taught to avoid risk, smile pretty and play it safe,” in their ambitions. Having attended an all-girls’ secondary school, I saw this drive for perfection develop in real time. I sat next to girls who would cut out pages from their notebooks instead of crossing out words. I watched the preppy ‘it’ girls light up when classmates praised their assignments as ‘perfect’. I, too, spent extra time making my revision notes just look flawless and, therefore, effortless.
I can’t speak for boys but I’ve witnessed how teenage girls learn to prioritise appearing perfect above all else. This expectation produces polished young women who crave the validation high grades provide. These accolades create a glossy veneer that many learn to maintain, even as the fear of failure erodes their courage underneath the surface. It’s this fear that stops many teenage girls from taking risks unless they’re certain they’ll succeed on the first try. For example, the UNESCO 2017 report that found ‘lower levels of confidence among girls even [when] they outperformed boys” in Computing and STEM.1
Teenage girls can stand proud and pretty on academic pedestals but have not been taught how to jump into, and recover, from failure. Raising girls to strive for perfection produces overly cautious young women who apply for promotions only when they meet 100% of the criteria compared to 60% for their male counterparts.2
So what can the modern woman do? She can dismantle perfection—and the craving for external validation that comes with it— as her metric for success and replace it with bravery. She can try something new, like starting a sports commentary TikTok page or joining a beginners’ hip-hop class, then let herself fail. She can become comfortable with imperfection.
A woman’s life should not be measured by how perfect she appears , but by how often she dares to leap, crack the polished pedestal, and rise to try again.
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With Love and One Letter At A Time,
Maxine Riike Brigue
UNESCO, Cracking the Code: Girls' and Women's Education in STEM, 2017, P.45
Hewlett Packard internal report via LinkedIn Gender Insights, 2019