What is the biggest decision you have done in your life? Donation to charity? Visiting the elderly? These might be a very good choices, but are they the same as Malala Yousafzai’s decision?

Her name is Malala Yousafzai. She is from Mingora, in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. She is now in her 20s and continuing her global work. I have known her by her autobiography “I am Malala” and her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

She grew up in a region where the Taliban increasingly enforced a brutal regime, banning television, music, and most critically, education for girls. At 11 or 12 years old, she blogged for the BBC about her life under Taliban rule, talking about her fear and desire to go to school. Her words were very bold, brave and defiant.

At the age of 15, a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus, asked for her by name and shot her in the head. She was wounded badly and had to go to the UK for extensive surgery and rehabilitation. The news of the attack shocked the world. Luckily, she survived, and rather than being silenced, she turned her personal tragedy into a global platform, becoming a voice for millions of girls denied education.

I am in awe of her courage to stand up for what is right in the face of literal death, and to continue with such grace and intelligence is profoundly admirable.