Eileen Gu: Courage To Try

Learn English with Eileen Gu. In this 2024 speech at the World Development Forum at Harvard, she shares a powerful message on critical curiosity, humility, and courage. She explains why young people can be both inquisitive and discerning, and why collaboration makes us stronger through our differences. Through her Olympic story, she shows how one brave decision can inspire millions.

Who This Speech Is For

• Learners who want to discuss youth leadership, critical thinking, and global cooperation.
• Students interested in women in sports, confidence, and decision-making under pressure.
• Intermediate to advanced learners practicing motivational and persuasive public speaking English.

How This Speech Helps Your English

• Builds advanced vocabulary around misinformation, humility, collaboration, and resilience.
• Demonstrates how to structure a speech from global problem to personal action.
• Shows how to integrate memorable quotes into clear argument flow.
• Helps you practice high-impact speaking with rhythm, contrast, and rhetorical emphasis.

Why This Speech Matters

• It frames young people as capable leaders right now, not only in the future.
• It argues that strong collaboration comes from differences, not sameness.
• It offers a real example of representation in action through a high-stakes Olympic decision.

Distinguished heads of government, young thought leaders, ladies and gentlemen. It’s an honor and privilege to speak to you today at the World Development Forum as youth delegate. Too often, the notion of being a young person in today’s world is associated with the multitude of issues that we’ve inherited: devastating wars, a catastrophic climate crisis, and inequality due to race, gender, or religion. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of circumstance that we find ourselves in, and to grow cynical in the face of our apparent insignificance.

After all, we’re only young. What could we possibly do? My response to this quandary is simple: we must recognize our youth not as a hindrance, but as a strength. Today, with the resources we have at our disposal, being young no longer means being naive, but it does mean being empowered in our curiosity.

It means that all of our youthful energy and zeal can positively reinforce itself as we discover the world around us. It means we are invigorated to ask new questions, to connect with different cultures, and to inspire change in the communities that we inhabit. This is why I’ve always been an outspoken advocate for education and remained in full-time school. Now, I balance classes at Stanford with being part of a sorority, founding a basketball team and book club, and taking part in other student-led groups.

I’m often asked how and why I choose to remain so engaged in campus life, despite balancing training as a professional athlete and work in the fashion industry. The truth is that breathing through the backstage butterflies of a fashion show, attending worldview-expanding astrophysics lectures, and performing double corks on skis all in the same week broadens my perspective and allows me to wield a diverse array of experience when it comes to confronting new situations. The truly exciting part of this is that, as students, young people get to experience the very same phenomenon right on their own campus, in their own microcosms. By communicating with people who are different from themselves, students can cultivate a wealth of knowledge that extends far beyond the confines of the classroom.

One particularly valuable skill that I’ve learned and have come to treasure in the process of campus learning is that which I call critical curiosity. This is the practice of approaching dissonant conversations with both an educated mind and an open heart. An important distinction to be made here is between being wide-eyed and gullible and being critically curious. Armed with both unprecedented access to information and digital citizenship skills, modern young people are uniquely positioned to be both inquisitive and discerning.

A second key component of critical curiosity is the expulsion of the ego from the learning process. To be curious is to be humble, and to be humble is to be willing to be wrong. Skiing has taught me to appreciate the value of resilience when it comes to modifying my approach after my original ideas were disproven. And I have been wrong, a lot.

I’ve sustained injuries, lost a four-year win streak after a contest was canceled, and I predicted the weather wrong, of all things. I’ve also run into stubborn mental barriers that made me want to bang my metaphorical head against their metaphorical walls. The important decision in these moments of misjudgment, though, was to consult my repository of knowledge and formulate a new plan on the spot. Being wrong does not make me a bad skier, but it does make me human.

I believe that school gave me the toolbox to learn more effectively, while training taught me how to continue that learning in the broader scope of my life and in the world beyond it, even if I fail the first, second, or third time. Combining these skills has allowed me to ask hard questions with a true willingness to learn, rather than sheltering behind what is familiar to me. In short, being a young person balancing school and sport encouraged me to be critically curious, and that allowed me to be a student of the world. Critical curiosity is especially salient in the context of modern misinformation.

Closed-mindedness is corrosive. It degrades the fabrics of domestic social, economic, and political spheres, breaks down international dialogue and exchange, and is ultimately harmful for global development. As individuals or nations, we will not always agree on the specifics of every issue. But when we approach collaboration the right way, our differences are not our weakness, they are our strength.

No matter how well-equipped we may be in our own fields, there’s always something to be learned from the individual sitting right next to us. We can overcome the forces that divide us and pit us against one another, and all we have to do is be critically curious. And so I implore you, no matter your age, to keep that seed of youthful curiosity in the back of your mind, and to let it see the sunlight often. If curiosity showed me the world, then courage allowed me to share it with others.

I’m privileged and grateful to have the platform that I do, and I consider it both an honor and a duty to use it to enact positive change in the world. I gave my first speech on equality in women’s sports and Title IX when I was in seventh grade. Since then, I’ve made it my mission to encourage young people, particularly girls, to participate in sports. This cause is what gave me the courage to do the bravest thing I’ve ever done.

At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, I stood at the top of the big air. On my last run of the finals, I’d already completed my two best tricks in the two runs prior, and I was sitting in third place, which was a respectable position for my first event at my first Olympics at the age of 18. But I had something else in mind. I wanted to try an unnatural double cork 1620, a trick that no woman before me, myself included, had ever even attempted during training.

It was 50% more rotation than the hardest trick that I could do, and to boot, it was in my unnatural direction, which is kind of like writing with your left hand. I had one chance to land the two flips and four and a half spins with the pressure of millions and millions of people watching on my shoulders. So I did the normal thing and I called my mom. She asked what I was going to do.

I told her, and she told me not to do it. She said that it was too dangerous, that I had two more events after big air, one of which I was the favorite to win, and that all in all, the decision was far too risky. I knew this, of course, but I also knew the power that I held in that moment as a young woman in a male-dominated sport. I had the opportunity to send a profound message to all the little girls watching at home.

I have maintained that the confidence, creativity, and passion that sports endow in young athletes allow them to step outside of their comfort zones, to break their boundaries, and become pioneers in their own right. Sometimes, it just takes a tiny external impetus for someone to close the gap between theory and practice. This is where representation comes in. I knew that in that moment, it was my turn to practice what I preached and to demonstrate that I was a young woman just like them, and that if I could be unafraid to try, then they could too.

The most important decision is the one to believe in yourself, to choose to believe that things are only impossible until they’re done, and that there is no one better than you to step up to the challenge. What followed was the most intense flow state of my life, culminating in my two feet on the ground and the realization that my life would never be the same. Now, over 346 million people in China have started snow sports, and I feel more proud and more confident using my voice as a force for good every day. A curious and empowered young person who has both the skills and vision to share a message is a formidable force, and I encourage all who do to speak proudly.

We do not have to wait until we are older to change the world, we can do it right now, aided by the qualities that are native and familiar to us. As I’ve illustrated, meaningful impact is not limited to words: we can achieve cultural communication and connection through sports, art, music, food, or fashion, because world development means uplifting others. And so to the young leaders in this room, I hope that you will join me in doing our part to make the world a better place in our own way.

Tags: Eileen Gu speech 2024, critical curiosity, Harvard World Development Forum, women in sports, youth leadership speech, motivational English speech