Deb Liu’s Double-Edged Sword of Resilience and Resentment

The Disrupters: Faith Changing Culture

For those not paying attention, it might seem as though Deb Liu, the CEO of Ancestry.com and the author of Take Back Your Power has been on a straightforward path to success her whole life. Despite Chinese cultural norms that tend to favor boys over girls, Deb’s parents were incredibly supportive, accepting her for who she was: “[My father] took us fishing, he taught me how to shoot. We went crabbing and shrimping. He treated us like he would any other boy or girl. And it was really great. I had such a wonderful childhood with him.” But great parents couldn’t fully protect Deb from what was seen as normal in the American south, “where people just brutally bullied you for being different,” according to Liu. For someone in her position, overcoming these kinds of experiences is often cited as a reason for success and not a barrier. But for Liu, it’s more complicated than that: “That taught me so much resilience, and yet gave me so much resentment at the same. I had to spend a lot of time really breaking through that…I used that resentment. I used it to actually help me accelerate my career, to get to college, to achieve so much. And yet at the same time, it was really hurting me too, because that chip on my shoulder of ‘I'm going to prove to them that I'm better than they think I am, that I'm more than they assume I am,’ really hurt me in the long term.” Disruptions discussed in this episode: MommySchool.net The Purpose Driven Life The Five Love Languages The Righteous Mind Why We’re Polarized Forward

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The Disrupters is hosted by Nancy Wang Yuen. Theme song is New Eyes by Jason Chu. Mixed and Edited by Matt Linder Producers: Richard Clark and Maila Kim Executive Producers: Andrew Bronson and Helen Lee

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