Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson - from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.

Don't solicit feedback on your product, idea or your business just for validation purposes. You want to tell the people who can help move your idea forward, but if you're just looking to your friend, co-worker, husband or wife for validation, be careful. It can stop a lot of multimillion-dollar ideas in their tracks in the beginning.

Most of the reason we don’t do things is because we’re afraid to fail. I just made a decision one day that I was not not going to do things in my life because of fear.

If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you've got to let it go.

I feel that women have been neglected, unnecessarily neglected and mistreated personally by the fashion industry and shapewear in that entire category was a definite place that we were neglected.

When I was a child, my father used to encourage my brother and me to fail. At the dinner table, instead of asking about the best part of our day, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something to tell him, he would be disappointed. When we shared whatever failure we'd endured, he'd high-five us and say, 'Way to go!' The gift my father gave us by doing this was redefining what failure truly meant.

I would say where I feel like I'm struggling the most in learning and giving myself permission to fail is in finding the balance in life. There are different aspects to women: there's the mother, there's the working woman, there's the wife, the friend, the sister, the daughter and so just figuring that all out. I continue to want to try new things and give myself permission to not be great at it.