Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Commencement Speech | Harvard Commencement 2014(Quest women’s week special)
Facebook COO, author and Harvard alumna Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95 addresses graduating seniors at Harvard’s Senior Class Day ceremony on May 28, 2014 .
Transcripts:
congratulations everyone you made it and i don’t mean to the end of college I mean to class day because if memory
serves some of your classmates had too many scorpion bowls of the con last night and are with us today given the weather
the one saying Harvard hasn’t figure out how to control some of your other
classmates are some place warm with a hot cocoa
so you have many reasons to feel proud of yourselves as you sit here today
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congratulations to your parents you have spent a lot of money so your child can
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say she went to a small school near Boston
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and thank you to the class of 2014 for inviting me to be part of your
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celebration means a great deal to me and looking at the list of past speakers was
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a little daunting
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I can’t be as funny as Amy Poehler but i’m going to be funny or the mother
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teresa
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25 years ago a man named Dave I did not know at the time but who would one day
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become my husband was sitting where you are sitting today 23 years ago I was
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sitting where you are sitting today dave and i are back this weekend with our
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amazing son and daughter to celebrate his reunion and we both share the same
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sentiment Harvard has a good basketball team standing here in the yard brings
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memories flooding back for me
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I arrived here from miami in the fall of nineteen eighty-seven with big hopes and
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even bigger hair
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I was assigned to live in one of harvard’s historic monuments to great
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architecture can today
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my go-to outfit and I’m not making this up was a jean skirt white leg warmers
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and sneakers and a Florida sweatshirt because my parents who were here with me
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then as they are here with me now
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told me everyone would think it was awesome that I was from Florida
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at least we didn’t have Instagram for me
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Harvard was a series of firsts my first winter coat
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we didn’t need those in Miami my first 10 page paper they didn’t assign those
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in my high school my first see after which my Proctor told me that she was on
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the admissions committee and I got and I got admitted to Harvard for my
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personality not my academic potential
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the first person I ever met from boarding school
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I thought that was her really troubled kids
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the first person I ever met who share a name with a whole building or so I met
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when the first classmate I met with sarah Wigglesworth who bore no relation
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at all to the dorm
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which would have been nice to know at that very intimidating moment but then I
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went on to meet others
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Francis Strauss James weld Jessica science center be
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my first love my first heartbreak
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the first time I realized I love to learn and the first and very last time I
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saw anyone read anything in Latin
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when i sat in your seat all those years ago I knew exactly where I was headed I
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had it all planned out
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I was going to the World Bank to work on global poverty then i would go to law
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school
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then i would spend my life working in a non-profit or in the government at
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harvard commencement tomorrow as your Dean describe each school is going to
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stand up and graduate together the college the law school than that school
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and so on
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at my graduation my class cheered for the PhD students and then food the
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business school business will seem like such a sellout 18 months later i applied
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to business school
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it wasn’t that I was wrong about what I would do decades after graduating I had
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it wrong
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a year and a half later and even if I could have predicted I would one day
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work in the private sector
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I never could have predicted facebook because there was no internet and Mark
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Zuckerberg was an elementary school
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already wearing his hoodie
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not locking into a path to early gave me an opportunity to go into a new and life
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changing field and for those of you who think I owe everything to good luck
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after candidate I got quoted
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what’s that bad
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there is no straight path from your seat today to where you are going don’t try
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to draw that line you will not just get it wrong you’ll miss big opportunities
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and I mean big like the internet
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careers are not ladders those days are long gone but jungle jims don’t just
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move up and down
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don’t just look up look backward sideways around corners your career and
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your life will have starts and stops and cigs and DAGs don’t stress out about the
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white space
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the path you can’t draw because there in lies both the surprises and the
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opportunities as you open yourself up to the possibility the most important thing
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I can tell you today is to open yourself up to honesty to telling the truth to
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each other to being honest with yourself and to being honest about the world we
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live in
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if you watch children you will immediately notice how honest they are
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my friend Betsy was pregnant and her son with their second child son Sam was five
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he wanted to know where the baby was in her body
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so we ask mommy for the beat his arms in your arms and she said no no Sam babies
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in my tummy pull baby mom or the baby’s legs in your legs
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no Sam whole babies in my tummy
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then mommy what’s growing in your butt
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yeah
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as adults we are almost never this honest and that can be a very good thing
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when I was pregnant with our first child
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I asked my husband Dave if my butt was getting big
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at first he didn’t answer but I press so he said yeah a little
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for years my sister-in-law said about him what people will now say about you
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for the rest of your life when you do something done and that guy went to
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Harvard
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hearing the truth at different times along the way would have helped me i
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would not have admitted it easily when i SAT where you sit
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but when I graduated I was much more worried about my love life and my career
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I thought I only had a few years very limited time to find one of the good
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guys before he was to our before they were all taken or I got too old so i
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moved to DC I met a good guy and i got married at the nearly decrepit age of 24
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I married a wonderful man but i had no business making that kind of commitment
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I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be my marriage fell apart within a
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year
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something that was really embarrassing and painful at the time and it did not
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help that so many friends came up to me and said I never knew that never thought
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that was going to work or I knew you two weren’t right for each other
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no one had managed to say anything like that to me before I marched down an
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aisle when it would have been far more useful and as I lived through those
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painful months of separation and divorce boy did I wish they had
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and boy did I wish I had asked them at the same time in my professional life
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someone did speak up my first boss out of college was lant pritchett an
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economist who teaches at the Kennedy School was here with us today after i
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deferred law school for the second time Lance SAT me down and said I don’t think
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you should go to law school at all
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I don’t think you want to go to law school I think you think you should
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because you told your parents you would many years ago
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he noted that he had never once heard me talk about the law with any interest I
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know how hard it can be to be honest with each other
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even your closest friends even when they’re about to make serious mistakes
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but I that’s sitting here today
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you know your closest friends strengths weaknesses
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what cliff they might drive off and i get for the most part
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you’ve never told them and they’ve never asked
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ask them ask them for the truth because it will help you
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and when they answer honestly know that that’s what makes them real friends
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asking for feedback is a really important habit to get into
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as you leave the structure of the school calendar and exams and grades behind on
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many jobs if you want to know how you’re doing
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you’re going to have to ask and then you’re going to have to listen without
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getting defensive
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take it from me listening to criticism is never fun but it’s the only way we
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can improve a few years ago mark zuckerberg decided he wanted to learn
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chinese and in order to practice
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he started trying to have work meetings with some of our Facebook colleagues who
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are native speakers
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now you would think it’s very limited language skills would keep these
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conversations from being useful one day he asked a woman who was there
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how it was going how did you like Facebook she answered with a long and
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pretty complicated sentence
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so he said you know simpler please she spoke again simpler please
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this went back and forth a couple of times she is blurted out and frustration
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my manager is bad that he understood so often the truth is sacrificed to
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conflict avoided or by the time we speak the truth
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we’ve used so many caveat sand preambles that the message totally gets lost
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so as you ask each other for the truth and other people can you elicit it in
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simple and clear language and when you speak your truth
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can you use simple and clear language as hard as it is to be honest with other
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people you can be even more difficult to be honest with ourselves for years after
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I had children I would say pretty often
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I don’t feel guilty working even when no one asked someone might say Cheryl has
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your day today and i would say great I don’t feel guilty working or do i need a
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sweater
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yes it’s unpredictably freezing and I don’t feel guilty working
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I was kind of like a parrot with issues
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then one day on the treadmill i was reading this article in sociology
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journal about how people don’t start out lying to other people
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they start out lying to themselves and the things we repeat most frequently are
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often those lies
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so his sweat was pouring down my face I started wondering what do I repeat
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pretty frequently and I realized I feel guilty working i dented a lot of
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research and I spent an entire year with my dear friend Alice covell writing a
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book talking about how I was thinking and feeling and I’m so grateful that so
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many women around the world connected to it
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my book of course was called fifty shades of grey
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yeah
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I can see a lot of you connected to it as well
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we have even more work to do in being honest about the world we live in
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we don’t always see the hard truths and once we see them
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we don’t always have the courage to speak out when my classmates and i were
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in college
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we thought the fight for gender equality was one it was over
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sure most of the leaders in every industry where men but we thought
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changing that was just a matter of time
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the mont library right over there one generation before us didn’t let women
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through its doors but by the time we sat in your seats
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everything was equal Harvard and Radcliffe was fully integrated we didn’t
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need feminism because we were already equals we were wrong I was wrong
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the world was not equal then and it is not equal now I think nowadays we don’t
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just hide ourselves from the hard truths and shut her eyes to the inequities what
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we suffer from the tyranny of low expectations in the last election cycle
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in the United States women one twenty percent of the senate seats and all the
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headlines kept screaming out women take over the Senate women take over the
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Senate
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I felt like screaming back wait a minute everyone
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fifty percent of the population getting twenty percent of seats
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that’s not a takeover that’s an embarrassment
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just a few months ago this year a very well respected in well-known business
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executive in Silicon Valley invited me to give a speech to his club on social
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media
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I’ve been to this club a few months before when I had been invited for a
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friend’s birthday
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it was a beautiful building and I was wandering around
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looking at it looking for the women’s room when a staff member informed me
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very firmly that the ladies room was over there and I should be sure not to
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go upstairs because women are never allowed in this building
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I didn’t realize I was in an all-male club until that minute I spent the rest
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of the night wondering what I was doing there wondering what everyone else was
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doing there wondering if any of my friends in San Francisco would invite me
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to us to a party at a club that didn’t allow blacks or Jews or Asians or gays
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being invited to give a business speech at this club hit me is even more
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egregious because you couldn’t claim that it was only social business wasn’t
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done there
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my first thought was really really a year after lean in this dude that it was
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a good idea to invite me to give a speech to his literal all-boys Club and
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he wasn’t alone
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there is an entire committee of well respected businessmen who joined him in
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issuing this kind invitation to paraphrase groucho marx and don’t worry
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i won’t try to do the voice
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I don’t want to speak in any club that won’t have me as a member so i said no
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and I did it in a way I probably wouldn’t have even five years before i
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wrote a long and passionate email arguing that they should change their
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policies they thanked me for my prompt response and wrote that perhaps things
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will eventually change our expectations are too low
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eventually needs to become immediately
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yeah
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we need to see the truth and speak the truth we tolerate discrimination and we
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pretend that opportunity is equal
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yes we elected an african-american president but racism is pervasive still
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yes there are women who run fortune 500 companies five percent to be precise but
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our road there is still paved with words like pushy and bossy
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while our male peers are leaders and results-focused african-american women
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have to prove that they’re not angry
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Latinos risk being branded at fiery hot Headz a group of asian american women
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and men at Facebook were kids one day
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that said I may or may not be good at math yes
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Harvard has a woman president and in two years the United States may have a woman
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president
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but in order to get their Hillary Clinton is gonna have to overcome two
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very real obstacles unknown and often understood gender bias and even worse a
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degree from Yale
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yeah
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you can challenge stereotypes but subtle and obvious at Facebook we have posters
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around the wall to inspire us done is better than perfect fortune favors the
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bold what would you do if you weren’t afraid my new favorite
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nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem
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I hope you feel that way about the problems you see in the world because
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they are not someone else’s problem
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gender and equality harms men along with women
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racism hurts whites along with minorities and the lack of equal
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opportunity keeps all of us from from fulfilling our true potential
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so as you graduate today i want to put some pressure on you i want to put some
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pressure on you to acknowledge the hard truths not shy away from them and when
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you see them to address them
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the first time I spoke out about what it was like to be a woman in the workforce
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was less than five years ago
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that means that for 18 years from where you set to where I stand
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my silence implied that everything was okay
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you can do better than I did and I mean that so sincerely at the same time
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I want to take some pressure off you sitting here today you don’t have to
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know what career you want or how to get the career you might want leaning in
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does not mean your path will be straight or smooth and most people who make great
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contributions start way later than Mark Zuckerberg find a jungle gym you want to
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play on and start climbing
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not only will you figure out what you want to do eventually but once you do
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you will crush it looking at you all here today I’m filled with hope all of
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you were admitted to a small school near Boston either for your academic
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potential your personality or both
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you’ve had your first whether it’s a winter coat a love for a see you’ve
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learned more about who you are and who you want to be and most importantly
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you’ve experienced the power of community you know that while you are
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extraordinary on your own
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we are all stronger and can be louder together
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I know
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that you will never forget Harvard and Harvard will never forget you
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especially during the next fundraising drive
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tomorrow you all become part of a lifelong community which offers truly
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great opportunity and therefore comes with real obligation
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you can make the world therefore everyone expect honesty from yourself
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and each other
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demand and create truly equal opportunity not eventually but now and
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tomorrow by the way you get something Mark Zuckerberg does not have a Harvard
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degree
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congratulations everyone
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ok
