Sheryl Sandberg Quotations

Sheryl Kara Sandberg / b. 1969 / Washington, DC, USA / Business Executive, VP of global online sales and operations at Google, COO of Facebook, COO of Meta Platforms, Founder of LeanIn.org

Business Philosophy

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Done is better than perfect.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Fortune does favor the bold and you’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t try.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Option A is not available. so let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.

Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).

Life is never perfect. We all live some form of Option B.

Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).

Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Each one of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).

Careers

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

Address to Harvard Business School Class of 2012, reported by Jay Yarrow in “Sheryl Sandberg’s Full HBS Speech: Get On A Rocketship Whenever You Get The Chance,” businessinsider.com, May 25, 2012.

I hope you find true meaning, contentment, and passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find whatever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you—yes, you—have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

I have never met a woman, or man, who stated emphatically, “Yes, I have it all.'” Because no matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Diversity

Endless data show that diverse teams make better decisions. We are building products that people with very diverse backgrounds use, and I think we all want our company makeup to reflect the makeup of the people who use our products. That’s not true of any industry really, and we have a long way to go.

Interview with Jessica Guynn in “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on tech’s diversity gap,” usatoday.com, March 11, 2013.

At the broadest level, we are not going to fix the numbers for under-representation in technology or any industry until we fix our education system and until we fix the stereotypes about women and minorities in math and science.

Girls are at 18% of computer science college majors. We can’t go much above 18% in our coders if there’s only 18% coming into the workplace, and at every level, more boys stay in than girls in every industry. In order to move numbers, we all understand that we have to increase the numbers going into the funnel.

Interview with Jessica Guynn in “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on tech’s diversity gap,” usatoday.com, March 11, 2013.

Leadership

There is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Marriage

When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

When women work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Motivation

Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Sandberg on Sandberg

I always tell people if you try to connect the dots of your career, if you mess it up you’re going to wind up on a very limited path. If I decided what I was going to do in college—when there was no Internet, no Google, no Facebook . . . I don’t want to make that mistake. The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.

Reported by Shana Montesol Johnson in “I Wouldn’t Plan On It,” developmentcrossroads.com, August, 2011.

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I become will catch me.

Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).

I don’t believe that everyone should make the same choices—that everyone has to want to be a CEO or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose, but I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us. I have a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.

Reported in “‘Lean In’: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Explains What’s Holding Women Back,” npr.org, March 11, 2013.

Tech Industry

What’s holding women back in computer science is the exact same thing . . . that’s holding women back in leadership. It’s something social scientists call “stereotype threat.”

Stereotype threat means that the more we’re aware of a stereotype, the more we act in accordance with it. So, stereotypically we believe girls are not good at math. Therefore, girls don’t do well at math, and it self-perpetuates. If you ask a girl right before she takes a math test to check off “M” or “F” for male or female, she does worse on that test. The reason there aren’t more women in computer science is there aren’t enough women in computer science.

Reported in “‘Lean In’: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Explains What’s Holding Women Back,” npr.org, March 11, 2013.

Women and Business

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Women need to shift from thinking “I’m not ready to do that” to thinking “I want to do that- and I’ll learn by doing it.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

. . . many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can’t seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are—impostors with limited skills or abilities.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

I want half, half, half across the board. Fifty percent. I would like women to earn 58% of the (computer science) degrees, because women earn 58% of college degrees.

Interview with Jessica Guynn in “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on tech’s diversity gap,” usatoday.com, March 11, 2013.

We call our little girls bossy. Go to a playground: Little girls get called “bossy” all the time, a word that’s almost never used for boys. And that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce. When a man does a good job, everyone says, “That’s great.” When a woman does that same thing, she’ll get feedback that says things like, “Your results are good, but your peers just don’t like you as much” or “maybe you were a little aggressive.”

Reported in “‘Lean In’: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Explains What’s Holding Women Back,” npr.org, March 11, 2013.