Why it’s time to toughen up, by Amy Chua

“Partly it’s being a woman, partly it’s being raised in a Chinese family, but growing up I just wanted to please people, so I did that for most of my life and it worked fine. Then I got into this whole ‘Tiger Mom’ controversy. It was such a shock, like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s not just a few people who hate me, the whole world hates me.’ Part of me just wanted to say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, it’s a very big misunderstanding, and I didn’t really mean that,’ and crawl into bed. But then a woman related to my publisher said, ‘Maybe you should just say: I’m proud. I made some mistakes but basically I am proud. Stop apologizing and stop trying to please everybody.’ And it just hit me – I literally changed on a dime – I toughened up internally and realized that you are never going to be able to please everybody and also, what is the advantage of trying to? If you’re always trying to please other people, you may not be a thought leader; you may not be the person everybody looks up to.

I think it’s how you respond to rejections, disappointments and challenges that defines you. I tell my daughters and my students that you should view failures as an opportunity – you come out stronger and wiser. I think the best way to have real inner strength is by overcoming adversity. After a couple of days of wallowing, you’ve got to say: you know what, I may be the only person that can help me. When something awful happens, if you somehow just hang tough, force yourself to get through it (and, by the way, it’s never elegant: you blunder your way, crawling around in the dark), you come out on the other side, able to look back and say, ‘If I can make it through that, maybe I can do something else that’s difficult.’

Even in day-to-day things, by overcoming tiny hurdles you gain strength and enable yourself to overcome future challenges, however small or big. It’s really good to push yourself out of your comfort zone and to stand up for yourself and other women. I’m almost toughest with the people I care most about. I view toughness, whether it’s with my students or my mentees or my own daughters, as believing in someone, possibly more than they believe in themselves, helping them achieve those high expectations. Saying, ‘Don’t give up’, ‘Don’t just blame other people’, ‘Don’t make excuses’, ‘You can be more’, or ‘You can be better than you think’.”

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (Bloomsbury) by Amy Chua is out now