Olympic champion Eileen Gu’s advice for women seeking her heights of career success: Don’t be a small fish in a big pond, ‘Create your own pond’

In 2025, Olympian Eileen Gu was one of the world’s highest-paid female athletes. Bringing in a reported $23.1 million, she was in the top five, she confirms with a wink.

After February’s Milan-Cortina Olympics, the 22-year-old athlete, who competes for China, became the most decorated Olympic freeskier in history, with six Olympic medals to her name.

Gu was recently honored by the women’s media platform the Shift as a woman shifting culture—in Gu’s case, in sports. At the Shift’s inaugural gala at Harvard Art Museums, she told Fortune what advice she would give to other women seeking to reach similar professional—and financial—heights in their own fields.

“Redefine what the boundary lines are,” she said. “Sometimes we think that the only options are being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, but my advice is to create your own pond. For me, that took the form of doing sports, skiing, and education all at the same time and doing it in a way that no one’s done before.”

“Women are naturally multifaceted,” she added. “Find what makes you you and amplify that and create your own pond.”

Gu also reflected on advice she would give her younger self. Not taking herself so seriously is her top piece of wisdom for young Eileen.

“I was always kind of a precocious young child, but in a way that manifested as always thinking that I was older than I was. When I was 8 or 9, I was like, ‘I’m too old to be doing this.’ But you’re never too old or too young or too anything to be doing anything.”

Emma Hinchliffe is Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor, overseeing editorial for the longstanding franchise. As a senior writer at Fortune, Emma has covered women in business and gender-lens news across business, politics, and culture. She is the lead author of the Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter (formerly the Broadsheet), Fortune’s daily missive for and about the women leading the business world.

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