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 "Seeping 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.

My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can.

And anyway, who wears a tiara on a jungle gym?

Nobody can succeed on their own.

Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.

Feeling confident - or pretending that you feel confident - is necessary to reach for opportunities. It's a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they're seized.

Coming from Google, you don't exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft.