How A Broken Heart Helped Abby Wambach Find Her Passion

As the chief sustainability officer at Nike, Hannah Jones is rethinking how the athletic brand produces its products. As an activist, retired soccer player Abby Wambach, who holds the record for most goals scored by any American National Team player (male or female), is fighting for equality for people of all genders, identities, and sexual orientations. In their own ways, both these women are making the world a better place.

At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Jones and Wambach joined editorial director Jill Bernstein to discuss how individuals and corporations can begin to effect positive change. Here are three rules these inspiring women live by.

Abby Wambach retired from professional sports in 2015, but her work isn’t done. The self-described “recovering soccer player” has a new opponent: inequality. She’s working to close the gender pay gap and make sports a level playing field for all athletes. Wambach’s experience as a gay woman led her to her second act–fighting for people who experience inequality every day, something her own life story made her familiar with.

“The thing that fed the activism part of my life is that I’m different,” Wambach said during the panel. “I’m not the status quo. I want to always fight for the little guy or the voiceless because certain parts of my life are the minority because I’m gay or I’m a woman.”

“We have a lot of room to grow,” Wambach added, “but the way I started out in [the activist] world is because I’ve become myself. I am who I am. I think that’s where any true activism is born from. My heart breaks. The way to truly figure out what you’re passionate about is to find out what breaks your heart and fix it.”

(Read More: Fast Company)