Soft Power

How a panic attack unearthed a new way of looking at the world

At the age of thirty six, I was in a nail salon having a panic attack. How did I get here? I stumbled a few blocks to my nail salon, barely making it through the chiming doors before running into the bathroom. My head began to levitate from my body like a balloon. As I struggled to breath, I clumsily opened ChatGPT and typed in my symptoms “light headed, heart palpitations, and disassociation.” All my symptoms pointed to a panic attack, verified by /panicattacks Reddit threads.

Where the hell did this panic attack come from?! For thirty six years, I had been a high functioning anxious person but never reaching full blown anxiety attack before. My anxiety kept me at peak performance and when it got too high I fell into a deep depressive spell. For years, I would oscillate between the highs and lows, shifting from working at breakneck speed to my body being forced to rest in a depressed cocoon.

No one works themselves to death without a good reason. I grew up believing in meritocracy. You study hard, you do the right things, you get the job, and everything works out. This was my promise at the end of my immigrant work ethic. But my father’s story shook out differently from what he taught me.

My father got into the Harvard of China by scoring the second highest on his province’s college entrance exam. Through sheer hard work and studying by the glow of an oil lamp, my father gained entrance to the prestigious Peking University to study aeronautical engineering. To his dismay, a corrupt communist bureaucrat swapped his admission ticket with his daughter’s, sending him to the women’s dorm of the local medical university. Either my father would have to wait another two years to retake his college entrance exam or go to a second tier university to study medicine. He became an ear, neck, nose, and throat doctor instead of an aeronautical engineer. Nevertheless, my father persevered in marrying his love for physics and engineering with medicine, securing a World Health Fellowship to research hearing science at the University of Michigan. Why was I not doing that, embracing the trials and tribulations, and turning it into success? Why was I panicking in the bathroom of a nail salon?

My therapist suggested I reflect on what I could learn from my panic attack. A big trigger for me was the anger that came from feeling tired, disillusioned and burnt out from my achievements in the past decade. I wasn’t alone in these feelings. Out of the class of 25 Rotational Product Managers (RPMs) at Facebook, there were only three women, including me. We all collectively felt run down and defeated after a decade in the tech industry. Meanwhile, the men in my class were doing just fine emotionally and financially – or at least they seemed to be from the outside according to Instagram, Forbes 30 under 30 lists, and TechCrunch articles. They had invested in each other’s companies, closed millions of dollars of venture funding via text and sometimes even without a pitch deck, marked up each other’s deals, and secured the sought after Silicon Valley “fuck you rich” status. While they all found ways to catalyze each other’s success, the three of us women were left holding the silver medalist position – close but not close enough. What went wrong?

What did the guys in our RPM class know and do that we didn’t? I spent weeks ruminating on this. Perhaps I was jealous of their ease and confidence in the climb? They exuded the ease that only comes from knowing the right people. The confidence of not having to prove you’re technical enough because no one questioned your abilities and credentials. I noticed many women executives in product at Meta opted to work in growth and ads like Naomi Gleit, Deb Liu, and Ami Vora. Meanwhile, male executives like Chris Cox and Adam Mosseri ran the visionary consumer product teams that required the elusive “product sense”. Why do women tend to forgo soft power and soft skills in favor of hard skills to fit into an industry that is dominated by men? How come the term “product guys” for the visionary Steve Jobs thinkers don’t apply to women? There is no equivalent term for “product gals”.

My male RPM classmates saw the world as relationship based whereas the women in my class saw the world as meritocratic and hard skills based. This difference in worldview and shared value led to compounding differences. While I felt betrayed and disillusioned by the idea of meritocracy, the guys were busy tapping into their relationships to get deals done. They had an invisible force buoying them up, while I was trying to design my own pulley system.

While my colleague Eric was raising seed funding from our classmate George’s fund, I was refining a data driven microfund pitch deck thinking that would unlock LPs. Little did I know access to high networth individuals had nothing to do with a perfect pitch deck… While Patrick closed his Series C from a well known VC he had worked with, my classmate Katrina struggled to raise follow-on capital for her startup despite entering YC and gaining early traction.

Was I playing checkers while they were playing chess? Maybe my anxiety attack came from the realization that I was playing the wrong game with the wrong rules. Was my world view passed down from my parents completely wrong? If so, could I learn the new rules of a different game?

If I could go back in time to tell my twenty something year old self what to do, how to cope, and prepare for the potential anxiety to come, I would tell her to focus on building soft power and soft skills along with my hard skills. I would tell her not to listen to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In gospel about acting just like a man in the workplace. Her rules will blow up against you especially if you’re expected to be a submissive Asian American woman. I would tell her it’s not about leaning harder into a system but rather playing by a different set of power rules.

Soft power is harnessing soft skills, indirect influence, and relationships to navigate powerful systems. Soft power greases the wheels and disarms resistance. Soft power wields influence in rooms where you may not hold direct authority. It enables you to crawl through the window sill into exclusive members-only rooms when the front door is shut. It befriends and acknowledges the admins and office managers who keep organizations running. It recruits allies, friends, fans, sponsors, and followers who help you win even when the odds are stacked against you.

Harnessing soft power isn’t just for women and minorities, you can be the white guy from the Midwest working at a white-shoe law firm, wondering why you feel left out when your partners talk about summering on the Cape or Nantucket. You might be the only college graduate in your family trying to decode conversations about skiing in Yellowstone Club. The value of a high end education is learning to seamlessly switch between cultural languages so you can talk to anyone and befriend them. Soft power doesn’t just apply in work settings, it’s observing the decision-making mechanisms of every situation, and learning the levers where you can exert your sphere of influence.

This panic attack forced me to unwire my thinking about “earning it”. Given my immigrant upbringing, seeing other people gain access to internships and jobs via a phone call from a rich relative or schmoozing at networking events felt slimy and sleazy. When you’re raised on the meritocracy myth, you feel shame in harnessing soft power because we tend to look down on soft skills. Over the dinner table, my father often lamented about bright graduate students who talked a big talk but could never publish papers or renew their grants. They were cautionary tales about not executing and delivering on your full potential and promises.

I came from a family steeped in scientific method. As a human being in my family, you need proof points along the way to demonstrate your worth. A meritocratic upbringing emphasizes hard skills like STEM, measured by objective standards in test-taking, and certifications. Meritocratic households mistake the objectivity of test scores and credentials for safety and security. It’s important to understand where our bias for hard skills comes from. In Adam Grant’s book Hidden Potential, he shares that US military training programs were responsible for classifying hard skills versus soft skills. Hard skills were defined by the military as working on weapons made from steel or aluminum–literally hard materials! Soft skills were the character skills that had nothing to do with weapons like social, emotional, and behavioral skills.

Maybe this panic attack stemmed from the unwilling acceptance that I had been hoodwinked and indoctrinated by my parents to play the wrong game. My parents raised me on a strict diet of hard work, test taking, and generating substantive output. According to my family, the worst thing you could be was a non-contributing and unproductive member of society. My dad told me early childhood stories of waking up in the middle of the night thinking it was dawn because he didn’t own a watch. He would work outside in the fields for hours, harvesting wheat, only to realize when the sun came up that he woke up too early. My own bias towards hard skills came from my father’s own immigrant strife.

Hard skills and meritocracy got my dad to America but when it came to climbing the bureaucracy and politics of academia he lacked the soft power skills to advance quickly. I discovered soft power as a young child through observing the limitations of my own parents' belief in meritocracy. At an early age I witnessed my dad working under a corrupt lab director who only hired Chinese graduate students because they worked hard, didn’t talk back, and gave him their original research ideas.

I became a vessel for my dad’s anguish and frustration of having his own research ideas stolen and his lab assistants poached. His own injustice transmuted into my study of soft skills, power dynamics, and invisible forces at play in American society. I swore I would find ways of transcending the proverbial bamboo ceiling with the privileges my parents bestowed me.

Maybe this panic attack was overdue. Maybe, it was even good for me. I was forced to confront the disbelief and unwilling acceptance that there are two types of games in life. Over indexing on hard skills is the finite game that we play while soft power allows us to play infinite games. According to James Carse’s book Finite Games and Infinite Games, finite games are binary: you either pass or fail a test, there is a clear winner or loser. Whereas infinite games allow for continuous play. You play to keep paying, not to win. The special people who glide through life, attracting and manifesting great things, with ease and finesse, are playing infinite games. They are playing to keep playing. Infinite players are people who possess a certain type of animus or renewable life force that keeps them going. They are prolific, always producing new ideas, creative projects, and serial entrepreneurial endeavors. They have a certain resilience and immunity to set backs. They are ever regenerating. They recover faster, harvest their learnings from failure, and attempt again.

This panic attack unearthed a new perspective. Maybe my anguish, fatigue, and burn out came through viewing the world as a finite game—one round and it’s over. In my myopic view, I thought I had lost despite all my hard work and hard skills. But I am not done playing yet. There are many more rounds to come. The path before me is still long. I have many careers, arcs, and creative projects to come. What I know now about soft power will take me further than I could ever imagine.

P.S. Question for my readers…

- What does soft power mean to you?

- How do you harness your hard skills vs soft skills and soft power?

- What more do you want to learn about the concept of soft power?

- Would you read a book about soft power?

- What other topics would you like me to explore and write about? I am spelunking for new ideas and creative projects!