Sheryl Sandberg: 'It turns out that counting your blessings can actually increase your blessings', Berkeley, 2016

14 May 2016, University of Berkeley, San Francisco, California, USA

Thank you, Marie. And thank you esteemed members of the faculty, proud parents, devoted friends, squirming siblings. Congratulations to all of you...and especially to the magnificent Berkeley graduating class of 2016!

It is a privilege to be here at Berkeley , which has produced so many Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, astronauts, members of C ongress , Olympic gold medalists.... and that’s just the women! Berkeley has always been ahead of the times. In the 1960s, you led the Free Speech Movement. Back in those days, people used to say that with all the long hair, how do we even tell the boys from the girls? We now know the answer: manbuns.

Early on, Berkeley opened its doors to the entire population. When this campus opened i n 1873 , the class included 167 men and 22 2 women. It took my alma mater another ninety years to award a single degree to a single woman . One of the women who came here in search of opportunity was Rosalind Nuss . Roz grew up scrubbing floors in the Brooklyn boardinghouse where she lived . She was pulled out of high school by her parents to help support their family. One of her teachers insisted that her parents put her back in to school — and in 1937, she sat where you are sitting today an d received a Berkeley degree. Roz was my grandmother . She was a huge inspiration to me and I’m so grateful that Berkeley recognized her potential.

I want to take a moment to offer a special congratulations to the many here today who are the first generation in their families to graduate from college . What a remarkable achievement.

Today is a day of celebration. A day to celebrate all the hard work that got you to this moment. Today is a day of thanks. A day to thank those who helped you get here — nurtured you, taught you, cheered you on , and dried your tears. Or at least the ones who didn’t draw on you with a Sharpie when you fell asleep at a party.

Today is a day of reflection. Because today marks the end of one era of your life and the beginning of something new. A commencement address is meant to be a dance between youth and wisdom. You have the youth . Someone comes in to be the voice of wisdom — that’s supposed to be me.

I stand up here and tell you all the things I have learned in life , you throw your cap in the air , you let your 2 family take a million photos – don’t forget to post them on Instagram — and everyone goes home happy.

Today will be a bit different. We will still do the caps and you still have to do the photos . But I am not here to tell you all the things I’ve learned in life.

Today I will try to tell you what I learned in death. I have never spoken publicly about this before . It’s hard. B ut I will do my very best not to blow my nose on this beautiful Berkeley robe.

One year and thirteen days ago , I lost my husband , Dave . 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. For many months afterward, and at many times since , I was swallowed up in the 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.

Dave’s death changed me in very profound ways. I learned about the depths of sadness and the brutality of loss. But I also learned that when life sucks you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface , and breathe again. I learned that in the face of the void — or in the face of any challenge — you can choose joy and meaning.

I’m sharing this with you in the hopes that today, as you take the next step in your life, you can learn the lessons that I only learned in death. Lessons about hope, strength, and the light within us that will not be extinguished.

Everyone who has made it through Cal has already experienced some disappointment. You wanted an A but you got a B. O K , let’s be honest — you got an A -­- but you ’ re still mad. You applied for an internship at Facebook, but you only got one from Google. She was the love of your life... but then she swiped left. Game of Thrones the show has diverged way too much from the books — and you bothered to read all four thousand three hundred and fifty -­- two pages .

You will almost certainly face more and deeper adversity . There’s loss of opportunity: the job that doesn’t work out, the illness or accident that changes everything in an instant . There’s loss of dignity : the sharp sting of prejudice when it happens . There’s loss of love : the broken relationships that can ’t be fixed . And sometimes there’s loss of life itself. Some of you have already experienced the kind of tragedy and hardship that leave an indelible mark.

Last year, Radhika , the winner of the University Medal , spoke so beautifully about the sudden loss of her mother. The question is not if some of these things will happen to you. They will. oday I want to talk about what happens next . A bout the things you can do to overcome adversity , no matter what form it takes or when it hits you .

The easy days ahead of you will be easy. It is the hard days — the times that challenge you to your very core — that will determine who you are. You will be defined not just by what you achieve, but by how you survive .

A few weeks after Dave died, I was talking to my friend Phil about a father -­- son activity that Dave was not here to do. We came up with a plan to fill in for Dave . I cried to him , “ But I want Dave.” Phil put his arm around me and said, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of option B.”

We all at some point live some form of option B. The question is: What do we do then? As a representative of Silicon Valley, I’m pleased to tell you there is data to learn from. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that there are three P ’ s — personalization, pervasiveness , and permanence — that are critical to how we bounce back from hardship .

The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives . The first P is personalization — the belief that we are at fault. This is different from taking responsibility , which you should always do. This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us. 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 . It wasn’t until I learned about the three P ’ s that I accepted that I could not have prevented his death. His doctors had not identified his coronary artery disease . I was an economics major; how could I have ?

Studies show that getting past personalization can actually make you stronger. Teachers who knew they could do better after students failed adjust ed their methods and saw future classes go on to excel . College swimmers who underperformed but believed they were capable of swimming faster did . Not taking failures personally allows us to recover — and even to thrive.

The second P is pervasiveness — the belief that an event will affect all areas of your life . You know that song “Everything is awesome?” This is the flip : “ Everything is awful. ” There’s no place to run or hide from the all -­- consuming sadness . The child psychologists I spoke to encouraged me to get my kids back to their routine as soon as possible .

So ten days after Dave died, they went back to school and I went 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 .

That brief second helped me see that there were other things in my life that were not awful . My children and I were healthy. My friends and family were so loving and they carried us — quite literally at times. The loss of a partner often has severe negative financial consequences, especially for women. So many single mothers — and fathers — struggle to make ends meet or have jobs that don’t allow them the time they need to care for their children. I had financial security, the ability to take the time off I needed, and a job that I did not just believe in, but where it’s actually OK to spend all day on Facebook. Gradually , my children started sleeping through the night, crying less, playing more.

The third P is permanence — the belief that the sorrow will last forever. For months, no matter what I did, it felt like the crushing grief would always be there . 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.

My rabbi told me that time would heal but for now I should “lean in to the suck . ” It was good advice , but not really what I meant by “lean i n . ” None of you need me to explain the fourth P...which is, of course, pizza from Cheese Board.

But I wish I had known about the three P ’ s when I was your age . There were so many times these lessons would have helped . Day one of my first job out of college, my boss found out that I didn’t know how to enter data into Lotus 1 -­- 2 -­- 3. That’s a spreadsheet — ask your parents .

His mouth dropped open and he said, ‘I can’t believe you got this job without knowing that” — and then walked out of the room. I went home convinced that I was going to be fired. I thought I was terrible at everything... but it turns out I was only terrible at spreadsheets.

Under standing pervasiveness would have saved me a lot of anxiety that week. I wish I had known about permanence when I broke up with boyfriends . It would’ve been a comfort to know that feeling was not going to last forever, and if I was being honest with myself... neither were any of those relationships.

And I wish I had understood personalization when boyfriends broke up with me. Sometimes it’s not you — it really is them. I mean , that dude never showered. And all three P’s ganged up on me in my twenties after my first marriage ended in divorce . I thought at the time that no matter what I accomplished, I was a massive failure .

The three P ’ s are common emotional reaction s to so many things that happen to us — in our careers , our personal lives , and our relationships. You’re probably feeling one of them right 5 now about something in your life . But if you can recognize you are falling into these trap s , you can catch yourself. Just as our bodies have a physiological immune system, our brains have a psychological immune system — and there are steps you can take to help kick it into gear.

One day my friend Adam Grant, a psychologist, suggested that I think about how much worse things could be. This was completely counterintuitive; it seemed like the way to recover was to try to find positive thoughts.

“Worse?” I said. “Are you kidding me? How could things be worse?” His answer cut straight through me: “Dave could have had that same cardiac arrhythmia while he was driving your children.” Wow. The moment he said it, I was overwhelmingly grateful that the rest of my family was alive and health y. That gratitude overtook some of the grief .

Finding gratitude and appreciation is key to resilience . People who take the time to list things they are grateful for are happier and healthier . It turns out that counting your blessings can actually increase your blessings .

My New Year’s resolution this year is to write down three moments of joy before I go to bed each night. This simple practice has changed my life. Because no matter what happens each day, I go to sleep thinking of something cheerful . Try it . Start tonight when you have so many fun moments to list — although maybe do it before you hit Ki p’ s and can still remember what they are .

Last month , eleven days before the anniversary of Dave’s death, I broke down crying to a friend of mine. We were sitting — of all places — on a bathroom floor. I said: “ Eleven days. One year ago, he had eleven days left. And we had no idea.” We looked at each other through tears, and asked how we would live if we knew we had eleven days left.

As you graduate, can you ask yourselves to live as if you had eleven days left? I don’t mean blow everything off and party all the time — although tonight is an exception . I mean live with the understanding of how precious every single day would be . How precious every day actually is.

A few years ago, my mom had to have her hip replaced. When she was younger , she always walked without pain . But as her hip disintegrated, each step became painful. Now, even years after her operation , she is grateful for every step she takes without pain — something that never would have occurred to her before.

As I stand here today, a year after the worst day of my life, two things are true. I have a huge reservoir of sadness that is with me always — right here where I can touch it . I never knew I could cry so often — or so much. But I am also aware that I am walking without pain. For the first time, I am grateful for each breath in and out — grateful for the gift of life itself.

I used to celebrate my birthday every five years and friends ’ birthdays sometimes . Now I celebrate always .I used to go to sleep worrying about all the things I messed up that day — and trust me that list was often quite long. Now I try really hard to focus on each day’s moments of joy .

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.

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 . There are so many moments of joy ahead of you. That trip you always wanted to take. A first kiss with someone you really like. The day you get a job doing something you truly believe in. Beating Stanford . (Go Bears ! ) All of these things will happen to you . Enjoy each and every one . 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 . An d when the challenges come , I hope you remember that anchored deep with in 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 very best version of yourself.

Class of 2016, as you leave Berkeley, build resilience . Build resilience in yourselves. When tragedy or disappointment strike , know that you have the ability to get through absolutely anything . I promise you do.

As the saying goes, we are more vulnerable than we ever thought, but we are stronger than we ever imagined. Build resilient organizations . If anyone can do it , you can , because Berkeley is filled with people who want to make the world a better place. Never stop working to do so — whether it’s a boardroom that is not representative or a campus that ’ s not safe . Speak up, especially at institutions like this one , which you hold so dear . My favorite poster at work reads, “ Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem . ” When you see something that ’ s broken, go fix it. Build resilient communities .

We find our humanity — our will to live and our ability to love — in our connections to one another . Be there for your family and friends. And I mean in person. Not just in a message with a heart emoji . Lift each other up, help each other kick the shit out of option B — and celebrate each and every moment of joy. You have the whole world in front of you . I can’t wait to see what you do with it. Congratulations, and Go Bears!

Subroto Bagchi: 'Go kiss the world', Indian Institute of Management - 2006

12 June 2008, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government- he reiterated to us that it was not ”his jeep” but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, “You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it”. That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons.

We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply,” We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said,

“Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God’s speed. Go! kiss the world.