Sheryl Sandberg gave the commencement speech at UC Berkeley on Saturday, one year and thirteen days after her husband Dave Goldberg died suddenly last year. Speaking to a crowd of students through occasional tears, she told the graduates how much that tragedy had taught her about the importance of resilience.
Sandberg, the bestselling author of Lean In and COO of Facebook, has written Facebook posts about the loss of her husband, but has not yet spoken publicly about his death. Here’s how she described that day:
“His death was sudden and unexpected. We were at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party in Mexico. I took a nap. Dave went to work out. What followed was the unthinkable—walking into a gym to find him lying on the floor. Flying home to tell my children that their father was gone. Watching his casket being lowered into the ground.”
His death, she said, plunged her into a “deep fog of grief—what I think of as the void—an emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even to breathe.”
But that wasn’t the only thing that happened after Dave’s death. “I also learned that when life sucks you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again,” she continued.
Sandberg went on to describe the three “P”s of bouncing back from setbacks, according to psychologist Martin Seligman: personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence. Once you understand the three Ps, Sandberg said, it’s much easier to fight back against the negative thinking that can make it difficult to stay resilient.
The first “P” is personalization, the belief that we’re at fault for whatever setback we’ve experienced. She describes blaming herself for not catching his condition sooner, even though there was no way she possibly could have known:
“When Dave died, I had a very common reaction, which was to blame myself. He died in seconds from a cardiac arrhythmia. I poured over his medical records asking what I could have—or should have—done… His doctors had not identified his coronary artery disease. I was an economics major; how could I have?”
The second “P” is pervasiveness, the belief that any tragedy will affect everything in our lives. Sandberg recalls being unable to imagine to see through her grief when she first came back to work.
“I remember sitting in my first Facebook meeting in a deep, deep haze. All I could think was, “What is everyone talking about and how could this possibly matter?” But then I got drawn into the discussion and for a second—a brief split second—I forgot about death.”
She also acknowledged that for less fortunate women, the loss of a partner can have even more devastating consequences that often affect the finances of the family.
The third “P” is permanence, the sense that any hardship will last forever, and that sadness multiplies into itself.
“We often project our current feelings out indefinitely—and experience what I think of as the second derivative of those feelings. We feel anxious—and then we feel anxious that we’re anxious. We feel sad—and then we feel sad that we’re sad. Instead, we should accept our feelings—but recognize that they will not last forever.”
Ultimately, she says, the death of her husband taught her the importance of gratitude for what she does have. “It is the greatest irony of my life that losing my husband helped me find deeper gratitude—gratitude for the kindness of my friends, the love of my family, the laughter of my children,” she says. “My hope for you is that you can find that gratitude—not just on the good days, like today, but on the hard ones, when you will really need it.”
And that, she says, is her message to the UC Berkeley Class of 2016. Career accomplishment is all well and good, but gratitude and resilience are the most valuable lessons that can be learned. Here’s how she ended the speech:
“I hope that you live your life—each precious day of it—with joy and meaning. I hope that you walk without pain—and that you are grateful for each step. And when the challenges come, I hope you remember that anchored deep within you is the ability to learn and grow. You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are—and you just might become the
Sheryl Sandberg
Born Sheryl Kara Sandberg
August 28, 1969
Washington, D.C., U.S.Residence Menlo Park, California Alma mater Harvard University (AB, MBA) Occupation COO of Facebook Years active 1991–present Salary US$15.5 million (2014) Net worth US$1.31 billion(December 2015)
Board member of The Walt Disney Company
Women for Women International
Center for Global Development
V-Day
SurveyMonkeySpouse(s) Brian Kraff (m. 1993; div. 1994)
Dave Goldberg (m. 2004;d. 2015)Children 2 (with Goldberg)
Sheryl Kara Sandberg (/ˈsændbərɡ/; born August 28, 1969)[4] is an American technology executive, activist, and author. She is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. In June 2012, she was elected to the board of directors by the existing board members becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook's board. Before she joined Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google and was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers.
In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine. As of June 2015, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.
Early life and education
Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. to a Jewish family, the daughter of Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg, and the oldest of three children. Her father is an ophthalmologist and her mother was a college teacher of the French language. Adele taught English as a second language and founded Ear Peace-Save Your Hearing, a nonprofit that teaches teens how to prevent hearing loss. She dropped out of a Ph.D. program when she was pregnant with Sheryl and concentrated on raising her children. Sheryl's maternal grandmother, Rosalind Einhorn, grew up in a poor family in a crowded apartment in New York City, finished high school in spite of being pulled out during The Great Depression, went on to community college, graduated from U.C. Berkeley, and later saved her family business from financial ruin. Sandberg's family was active in helping Soviet Jews make aliyah to Israel during refusenik era and attended rallies during the weekends. She and her siblings had Soviet Bar and Bat Mitzvah twins. Her parents were detained and interrogated in Kishinev and later expelled from the USSR.
Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, where she was "always at the top of her class", and graduated ninth in her class with a 4.646 grade point average. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.
In 1987 Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. She graduated in 1991 summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, she co-founded an organization called Women in Economics and Government. She met then-professor Larry Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked for approximately one year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.
In 1993 she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her M.B.A. with highest distinction. In her first year of business school, she won a fellowship.
Career
After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995-1996). From 1996 to 2001 she again worked for Larry Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. Sandberg assisted in the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.
When the Republicans swept the Democrats out in November 2000, Sandberg left her job. She then moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 and joined Google Inc., serving as its Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations from November 2001 to March 2008 She was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising and publishing products as well as for sales operations of Google's consumer products and Google Book Search.
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig; at the time, she was considering becoming a senior executive for The Washington Post Company. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO, but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. They spent more time together in January 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In March 2008, Facebook announced hiring Sheryl Sandberg away from Google for the role of COO.
After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring, Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, she oversees the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications.
Sandberg's executive compensation for FY 2011 was $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in FB shares. According to her Form 3, she also owns 38,122,000 stock options and restricted stock units (worth approx. $1.45 billion as of mid-May 2012) that will be completely vested by May 2022, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date.
In 2012 she became the eighth member (and the first female member) of Facebook's board of directors.
In October 2012, Business Insider reported that stock units (appx. 34 million) vested in Sandberg's name accounted for nearly US$790,000,000. Facebook withheld roughly 15 million of those stocks for tax reasons, leaving her with nearly US$417,000,000.The media reported on August 12, 2013 that she sold 2.4 million shares in the company worth about US $91 million — 5 percent of her total stake in the company.
In April 2014, it was reported that Sandberg had sold over half of her shares in Facebook since the company went public. At the time of Facebook's IPO she held approximately 41 million shares in the company; after several rounds of sales she is left with around 17.2 million shares, a
0.5% stake in the company, worth about one billion dollars.
Boards
In 2009 Sandberg was named to the board of The Walt Disney Company. She also serves on the boards of Women for Women International, theCenter for Global Development and V-Day. She was previously a board member of Starbucks with a $280,000 annual salary, Brookings Institution and Ad Council.
Other work and ventures
In 2008 Sandberg wrote an article for The Huffington Post in support of her mentor, Larry Summers, who was under fire for his comments about women She was a keynote speaker at the Jewish Community Federation's Business Leadership Council in 2010. In December 2010, she gave a TED speech titled "Why we have too few women leaders." In May 2011 she gave the Commencement Address at the Barnard College graduation ceremony. She spoke as the keynote speaker at the Class Day ceremony at the Harvard Business School in May 2012. In April 2013, she was the keynote speaker for Colgate University's second annual Entrepreneur Weekend. In 2015 she signed an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they serve as the head of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa respectively, which will start to set the priorities in development funding before a main UN summit in September 2015 that will establish new development goals for the generation.
Lean In
Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013. It is about business leadership and development, issues with the lack of women in government and business leadership positions, and feminism. As of the fall of 2013, the book sold more than one million copies and was on top of the bestseller lists since its launch.
Lean In is a book for professional women to help them achieve their career goals and for men who want to contribute to a more equitable society. The book looks at the barriers preventing women from taking leadership roles in the workplace, barriers such as discrimination, blatant and subtle sexism, and sexual harassment. She also examines societal barriers such as the fact that women still work the double day and the devaluing of work inside the home as opposed to work outside the home. Along with the latter there are the barriers that women create for themselves through internalizing systematic discrimination and societal gender roles. Sandberg argues that in order for change to happen women need to break down these societal and personal barriers by striving for and achieving leadership roles. The ultimate goal is to encourage women to l
ean in to positions of leadership because she asserts that by having more female voices in positions of power there will be more equitable opportunities created for everyone.
“ A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes. ”
Ban Bossy
In March 2014, Sandberg and Lean In sponsored the Ban Bossy campaign, a television and social media censorship advocacy campaign designed to ban the word bossy from general use due to its perceived harmful effect on young girls. Several video spots with notable spokespersons including Beyonce, Jennifer Garner, and Condoleezza Rice among others were produced along with a web site providing school training material, leadership tips, and an online pledge form to which visitors can promise not to use the word.
Criticism
One critic claimed that Sandberg is "too elitist" and another that she is "tone-deaf" to the struggles faced by the average woman in the workplace.
Sandberg addresses both of these issues in the introduction of her book, stating that she is "acutely aware that the vast majority of women are struggling to make ends meet and take care of their families" and that her intention was to "offer advice that would have been useful long before I had heard of Google or Facebook."
Personal life
Sandberg first married at age 24 and divorced a year later. In 2004, she married Dave Goldberg, then an executive with Yahoo! and later CEO ofSurveyMonkey. The couple has a son and a daughter. Sandberg and Goldberg frequently discussed being in a Shared Earning/Shared Parenting Marriage. Sandberg also raised the issue of single parenting conflicting strongly with professional and economic development in America.
On May 1, 2015, Goldberg died after sustaining a head trauma falling from a treadmill while the couple was vacationing in Mexico.
Some honors and awards
Sheryl Sandberg has been ranked one of the 50 "Most Powerful Women in Business" by Fortune Magazine:
In 2007 she was ranked #29 and was the youngest woman on the list.
In 2008 she was ranked #34.
In 2009 she was ranked #22.
In 2010 she was ranked #16.
In 2014 she was ranked #10.
On the list of 50 "Women to Watch" by The Wall Street Journal.
She was ranked #19 on that list in 2007.
She was ranked #21 on that list in 2008.
Sandberg was named one of the "25 Most Influential People on the Web" by Business Week in 2009.
She has been listed as one of the world's 100 most powerful women by Forbes. In 2014, Sandberg was listed as ninth, just behind Michelle Obama
In 2012, Newsweek and The Daily Beast released their first "Digital Power Index", a list of the 100 most significant people in the digital world that year (plus 10 additional "Lifetime Achievement" winners), and she was ranked #3 in the "Evangelists" category.
In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.
Lean In was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2013).
In 2013, she was ranked #8 on the "The World's 50 Most Influential Jews" conducted by The Jerusalem Post.
Sandberg delivered the commencement address at the graduation of University of California Berkeley's Class of 2016. It was the first time she spoke publicly about her husband's death, and stressed the importance of resilience.
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