The ability to empathize exists in every human, but how would you describe your ability to empathize? Is it possible to let go of our biases about ourselves? And did you know that there is something called “survivor bias?”
Olivia Wong is a Chinese-American entrepreneur, award-winning humanitarian, and Miss Asian Global 2020-2022. She is the Senior Partner at Prototype Thinking Labs, a business design and innovation lab focused on solving new business models 10x faster. Using a unique approach born at Google X, Olivia trains companies to confidently run experiments and build new solutions with a fraction of the effort, cost, and time. Previously, she served as a humanitarian aid worker at Zaatari, the world's largest Syrian refugee camp, and in Fukushima, Japan, after the nuclear disaster.
To learn more about Olivia Wong:
- Facebook: Olivia Wong
- Instagram: @oliviamwong
- LinkedIn: Olivia Wong
Visit her website at 👉🏻 https://www.wongolivia.com/
Below is our edited transcript of Olivia Wong’s talk, “The Power of Empathy,” at the Imagine Talks Annual Symposium.
Introducing Olivia Wong
Francis Kong: Hi, Olivia, how are you?
Olivia Wong: Hi, Francis, I’m doing well. How are you? Happy 2021.
Francis Kong: Happy, happy 2021! And always wonderful to see you.
Francis Kong: You’re out there in Canada right now, I believe, right?
Olivia Wong: In Vancouver, where it’s rainy and dark and we probably have about three hours of sunlight every day.
Francis Kong: It sounds...
Olivia Wong: But I like it.
Francis Kong: It sounds glorious.
Francis Kong: So for those who haven’t gotten to know you that well yet, would you mind introducing yourself to us? Tell us basically where you’re from, who you are. How did you start [to] get the work that you do now? And of course, touch a little bit on your amazing journey to the road of becoming the current Miss Asian Global 2020.
Olivia Wong: Sure, I’d be happy to.
Being an Introvert and Rebel as Well
Olivia Wong: So let’s see. I was born in San Francisco. I’m Chinese-American. I grew up in [a] neighborhood where my parents moved after they immigrated from Hong Kong and China. And for most of my life, I would say I didn’t really fit in. I was the perfect chameleon., I could make a lot of friends, I was on all the varsity teams, but internally I was always an introvert and almost a rebel as well. I remember [when] I played basketball in club basketball.
Olivia Wong: So this is all Asian League and I played from sixth grade all the way up until the time I went to college. And one of my favorite memories is actually being outside and we were in Fremont. It was either Fremont or Sacramento—we were playing basketball. I remember it was really hot and I just told my entire team to jump into the pool with our jerseys on, even though we had two games afterward[s]. And it wasn’t really a thing I thought about, but we just did.
Olivia Wong: And after that, all of the parents on all the teams hated me, because we were just like walking through the gym, dripping wet in water. And that sort of is the essence, I would say, of who I was as a child. I always pushed boundaries. When I was young a lot of people around me in San Francisco told me that I shouldn’t try to go to a good college. They said you should just go to community college and there’s nothing wrong with going to community college.
Doing a Lot of Things that Most People Wouldn’t Do
Olivia Wong: I think that’s great. But they really had very low expectations from me. And there was some part of me that really wanted to show people that I had more, more about me, more ambition, more of a spirit that they couldn’t really tame. And I didn’t know how to channel that energy. So when I was really young, I just started to do a lot of things that most people wouldn’t do. For example, I didn’t go into a traditional path university. By the time that I was actually my third year of university, I realized that I was—I just didn’t care for academics.
Olivia Wong: I couldn’t be bothered to go to class. And that’s something that you shouldn’t tell any Asian parent, that you just don’t want to be in school because they have to pay all this money and it’s expensive, right? But what really motivated me in life was having human experiences—direct personal experiences. And so in my third year of university, I decided that I actually wanted to go into the field and serve. I’ve been studying Poli Sci [at] UC Santa Barbara.
Ended Up Traveling To Syria
Olivia Wong: And the thing that really excited me was actually this one course that I took on distributive justice. And we talked about the difference between trying to help someone who lives locally like, say, in your backyard to helping someone who is so far across the world, not in your reality, and what motivates of human person to do that. And so instead of actually taking—well, I took the course— I finished the course—it was fine [and] it was great.
Olivia Wong: But instead of continually pursuing academics and going for Masters, I ended up traveling to Syria on my third year of university, and I decided that I wanted to work in the field. I also was working in Fukushima, Japan during that time in 2011—after the nuclear disaster. And something finally clicked for me. I thought—for me, I’m a person who doesn’t like to work on toy problems. I’m a person who can’t really follow the rules very well.
Olivia Wong: I’m a person who probably would be terrible at a nine-to-five job because I don’t like to follow authority. So I’m going to try my hand at this thing that I think is my passion. And that’s what really led me into a career of human rights, working in the front lines of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima—in emergency response and then later starting a non-profit and joining a philanthropic foundation. So that’s sort of the beginning of my life as Olivia.
Olivia Wong’s Journey to Miss Asian Global 2020
Francis Kong: And then how did that—how did that link into your connection and journey to Miss Asian Global 2020?
Olivia Wong: Every year—so, I like to reinvent myself, I felt very limited by this idea of identity when I was in my mid 20s. This is the time where Instagram blew up—where people were being sort of characterized by a few words, a few nouns on their Twitter bio, their Facebook bio. And I know that sounds somewhat superficial, but it actually has a really big impact on—I believe, myself and people in my generation that we feel that we have to be identified by a singular noun.
Olivia Wong: The CEO of this company, you know, a UX designer, a person who is a creative or whatever it is and I felt very limited by that. And it took me actually quite a long time to realize that we are human people who can try on many different things and for example, the world of drag has always inspired me because it teaches us that when we’re born, we get to decide who we want to be. We don’t have to take on what society imposes on us.
Olivia Wong: And so for me, every one to three years, I like to try something completely new and different. When I was in school, when I was in high school, I thought that I would be a curator because I actually worked at the de Young Museum and I gave tours and I was a docent for a fine arts exhibit in the de Young Museum. So that was my thing. And then I went to college and I thought, “Oh, I want to work for the United Nations.”
Trying Many Different Things All at Once
Olivia Wong: And that’s what led me to Syria. After school, I decided, “Oh, I want to be this nonprofit director.” And I did that. And then I decided, “Well, this is not working for me because I have empathy and emotional fatigue. I want to start my own company in the private sector and I want to be a CEO and founder.” And then I did that. So that’s sort of where I am right now. And about two and a half years ago, I met a friend who opened my eyes to the world of pageantry.
Olivia Wong: She had worked at the intersection of human rights and abolition and slavery and human trafficking. And she was also Miss Canada. So seeing someone in the world who had so much beauty and grace, but also a heart that was so refined and diligent around service that really excited me. And I thought there’s something about this person that inspires me and motivates me to want to go into pageantry. So here I am. Miss Asian Global was my second pageant. I lost my first very badly, if I must say, and I won Miss Asian Global during the peak of the pandemic in 2020.
Olivia Wong: So that’s how I became a beauty pageant queen.
Francis Kong: Fantastic. What a fun story. And so now. How does—you mentioned about your missionary work that also led to your discovery of who you are and also the ideas of reinventing yourself. Even down the path of pageantry, and you’re definitely not your typical pageant girl by any means. I really want—one thing that I was always drawn to was your work—Internationally—missions.
What Are The Amazing Experiences That Shaped and Developed Olivia Wong Today?
Francis Kong: So can you tell us a bit about your missionary work that you’ve done like how many countries have you worked with and what are some of your most amazing experiences that you've gone through that helped you develop [the] person of who you are today?
Olivia Wong: I’ve traveled somewhere between 20 and 30 countries. I think I made a joke with you, I’ve lost my passport, so I have no idea how many there are. And every time I apply to a government job, I have to go through every single country I’ve traveled to in my life and find all of my contacts.
Olivia Wong: So I would say it’s about maybe two dozen, a little over two dozen countries across the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and mostly in the developing south. I would say that the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from traveling is overcoming something called “bias,” which sounds very sort of basic and we might understand what bias means, but specifically the bias of living in a developing country. People who are not exposed to the adversity and challenges that exist in the world live in and I would say in a very privileged bubble and for the first 20 years of my life, I lived in that bubble.
Olivia Wong: I am from a middle-class family. I had a great education. I had access to clean water, health, education, and my challenges were in direct proportion to my lifestyle. When I started to travel and I started to meet people who live in abject poverty, which means they make probably less than a US dollar a day, when I realized that I was making more at my summer job, selling clothes in downtown San Francisco at Aritzia than an entire family would make an entire year in Nepal.
Olivia Wong: It suddenly changed my perception of bias. I didn’t feel that many challenges were that hard, actually. It also gave me a lens into what this thing is called happiness, which is so elusive and it’s this thing that I think the majority of the world and society is chasing. And I realize that everything that my had my upbringing had taught me about happiness was actually false.
Olivia Wong: It was this whole lie like I had been set up to fail because they told me, “Happiness comes from making a lot of money, being able to buy expensive things, constantly, making more in your career, having a lot of followers, having a lot of friends, having a lot of external accolades.” And I thought that was [the] truth. Like that was my truth for twenty to twenty-six years old of me being a human being on this planet and I tried all of those things and it didn’t work for me.
I ran into issues of burnout, of depression, of anxiety, of losing friendships, of being completely isolated, of having like mental health breakdowns and it made me pause and think about the world that I live in and why these are the things that are driving us as a species and as a community. Then I remembered all of the times where I was the most happiest. And it was when I was actually traveling and working with very local remote countries or very remote local communities, places where the majority of people will never touch.
It’s not even like the place where we are, it’s not even Google Maps, you can't find it. And I think in those places where I met people, it really touched me and it made me think about what really matters. And now what I can say with some conviction is—it’s relationships. It’s the conversations that we’re having right now at Imagine Talks. It’s the values that we live by, the virtues, the altruism that we expressed through our service and through our mission.
Giving Without The Expectation
Olivia Wong: And that’s really what I’m focused on now that I’m twenty-nine. I’m in this role where people are looking up to me and all I want to do is focus on giving without [the] expectation. And I haven’t always been able to do that. Sometimes I used to give hoping to get something out of it. Maybe that was a pat on the back or to feel really good. But I’m really in this place in my life where selfless service is the number one for me.
Olivia Wong: So that’s kind of where I am and what I’m up to nowadays.
The Mission of The Empathy World Tour
Francis Kong: Fantastic! And that’s leading up to my next question which is something that you did in 2020, which is very timely for 2020, it seems like it’s almost the cumulation of—accumulation of all of your experiences that now in a more concentrated form and you talked about conversations and connecting people. What is—what was the “empathy tour” that you basically added and designed and executed in 2020, what was it about and what was the mission? And what were—how did you go about selecting the people that you want to work with for that?
Olivia Wong: The Empathy World Tour was one of my first initiatives, and the reason why I created this tour is because, first of all, I think one of the best ways to be visible as Miss Asian Global is to speak. I am a person who is a public speaker. I love sharing stories. And I think it’s through storytelling that we can start to overcome our biases about ourselves. There’s even something called, which I just learned called “survivor bias,” which means when we think that we’ve had a hard life and we face diversity, we tend to disqualify all of the other suffering that other people have in their life.
Olivia Wong: So we think, “Well, you know what? My life was really hard. I didn't have a great upbringing, I experienced childhood trauma, I went through these things and the world wasn't kind to me. And so, you know what? The world shouldn’t be kind to you.” And I find that's a very common sentiment right now, especially in this pandemic, where people are more sort of focused on their own pain and suffering, that it's very hard for them to sort of step out of their own lens and see other people.
Olivia Wong: And for me, I wish that sometimes I could turn off my empathy. It’s a skill that a lot of people have. It’s like one of thirty-four skills in the Clifton StrengthsFinder. So almost every human has a capacity to be empathetic, but we just have different capacities. And for me, it’s turned up all the way to the very top and I wish sometimes I could turn it down, but I can’t. And so what that means is I go around the world trying to connect to people in empathetic ways.
Olivia Wong: And for example, there is a really great sub-Reddit. It’s called Off My Chest. And you can meet anyone in the world in an anonymous way on Reddit and listen to them and like their deepest stories and what they’re going through in their pains.
Off My Chest | A Safe Community for Support on Reddit
This is a great exercise and just understanding how deeply empathetic [we] are as humans because when you read about someone’s suffering, you can’t hold any prejudice against them because you feel on the same level that they are suffering, that you are the same.
Olivia Wong: So there’s this interconnectedness that is bonding to humans together. And I remember through my stories of traveling to different places and working in remote areas that it was through meeting another person, even if we didn’t speak the same language, it was that connection that helped me overcome my own prejudice. One of the things that I remember the most is I spent a lot of time working with refugees, specifically from us, from Iraq, and from Syria, and when I came back to the states at the sort of the peak of the Syrian crisis, which is in 2013, I could see so many people feel that refugees were taking away their rights and their health care and their jobs and everything like this.
Breaking Through Barriers with Olivia Wong
Olivia Wong: And I thought, “What’s the best way to just break down these barriers?”
It’s through conversations and meeting people and making friendships. And so that is really the crux of the Empathy World tour I bring on a speaker who has a personal direct lived experience in one of the main issue areas that I’ve identified, that being mental health, suicide prevention, homelessness, veterans affairs, black lives matters. We have women’s rights, climate change, neurodiversity, refugees, and immigrants. So those are the top issues that I have identified as being important to me because they touch on the bigger issues that I care about, which [are] human rights and compassion, and empathy.
So through the tour, I go around the world essentially around to these topics and have these conversations with people and we talk about what it’s like to be them and what they wish other people knew. And just recently, I actually had the humble privilege of talking to Suzan Nguyen, who was a guest judge at Miss Asian Global. And she has this incredible life story of losing her arm at the age of twenty-two and then having to identify as disabled and what that’s been like and all of these sort of hidden moments where most people wouldn’t be able to see into her life.
Olivia Wong: And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, is to create this opportunity for people to listen to other people’s stories so that we can bridge understanding and foster empathy in places where, maybe you won’t have a chance to meet someone who is disabled or who’s queer or who is trans or who is constantly lived with the aggression of white supremacy. Like, these are things that not every single person has the opportunity or the ability to experience. But you can through someone’s story.
Olivia Wong: So that’s where we are with the Empathy World Tour.
Francis Kong: I love that. It’s essentially the whole statement embodied: “We don’t know somebody until you walk in their shoes.”
Olivia Wong: Exactly, exactly.
Francis Kong: I love that.
Olivia Wong: So well said.
Francis Kong: So that essentially brings me to...we’re running out of time and this always go so fast when I’m talking to you, but my final question is, I’m learning a lot about what your mission is, was making sure that people can understand this type of emotional intelligence you’re talking about, this is a way to connect and feel and have empathy.
Francis Kong: How has 2020 taught us the importance of having emotional intelligence, actually being able to — Black Lives Matter is a perfect example of the— anti-Asian sentiments that came up was another perfect example. How does— how can we take the lessons of 2020 really process that in the whole realm of emotional intelligence going forward [from] 2021 onwards?
Olivia Wong: We are all connected by pain. It’s the human condition that we experience pain and we resonate, and it actually is the driver and the impetus for change in human behavior.
Olivia Wong: So if we want a better world, we have to feel our pain. And a lot of that requires us to be brave and to allow ourselves to experience what it’s like to feel someone else’s pain and one of the examples that I will give you is there’s this ongoing conversation and also antagonistic fight right now between people who wear [a] mask and who don’t wear masks. If you ask anyone who has had to watch their parent or loved one or child be on a ventilator [or] in an ICU unit.
Olivia Wong: By themselves dying on their deathbed without having the opportunity to even say goodbye. If you ask someone what that experience is like, I will almost be certain that you would want to wear a mask because it’s the right thing to do to help other people, to look out for your fellow community members, to make sure that we can all survive and get out of this pandemic alive. If you don’t have that experience because you just don’t know anyone who’s been affected or maybe you have no one around you that’s, you know, compromised or suppressed, maybe you have everyone who’s, like in their early 20s and, you know, you’re doing really great and healthy.
Olivia Wong: And that’s just not part of your reality. It’s a lot easier to turn the other way and say, “You know what, I don’t want to wear this. This is taking away my rights, that’s taking away my beliefs, this is impeding on my freedom.” And I’m not saying any reality is more important or more truthful. Those are two realities that are absolutely valid. But I think when we were able to actually see and lean into. Well, what is it like for people who have lost a family member this year during COVID? Did they have to go to Christmas and all of a sudden ther’s this empty seat at the table and they no longer get to see their dad or mom?
Olivia Wong: To me, being able to be empathetic and emotionally intelligent is to, for one second, suspend your own reality and allow yourself to sit in that seat of the other person. And I think that— that really is the cure to everything in this world.
Olivia Wong: We can end the destruction to the planet by simply caring about the planet and caring about the people that it provides, you know, water and livelihood, too. We can actually probably end racism if we thought about how our actions affect other people, it’s really that simple. So I think that emotional EQ and empathy, it’s sort of people give it a hand wave. It’s sort of this thing that they’re like, “Yeah, it’s a nice to have.” But how important is it when we’re talking about something of this seismic importance?
Olivia Wong: For example, we know the U.S. is not doing very well right now in its response to COVID and on the other hand, New Zealand and New Zealand’s prime minister has been applauded for her ability to use empathy with her strategic thinking. I really think that if we want to be able to change the world and solve this pandemic and also prevent seismic challenges of the sort in the future, we need to bridge our understanding of what leadership means. And so in empathy with our strategic thinking.
Olivia Wong: And that is not something that is [a] nice to have. It’s unnecessary to have. And I can’t see us actually getting out of this pandemic without it.
Francis Kong: Then, [you’ve] said it better myself, and we were basically at the end of the interview, so thank you again so much for your insight. I learned so much about the importance of emotion as a basis of the starting point of where the competition you to start from and acknowledging each person we need before we sit down and talk, acknowledging each person’s perspective of where they’re coming from.
Francis Kong: And that would literally—that’s more than half the battle of just trying to come to a converging point of agreement and being constructive from that point on. So I hope I get to finally meet you in person some time in 2021 or 2022
Olivia Wong: Have we not met in person? That’s crazy.
Francis Kong: We have not met in person yet, this is still virtual in terms of our engagement to each other. So I hope I get to meet you some time in the next 365 days. And when you can make back over here to the States and let us know so we can at least try to arrange something to meet up. But for now, thank you again for all your work. Thanks for the amazing Miss Asian Global role model for so many people out there.
Francis Kong: And I wish you an amazing 2021 and I will talk to you again very soon. OK, Olivia?
Olivia Wong: Thank you. Francis. Take care.
Francis Kong: Take care. Bye now.
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