So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren't afraid? And then go do it.

All of us want the same things. We want to be good to the people around us and for our lives to have meaning. For me that means making the world a little bit easier for women.

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.

We've got to get women to sit at the table.

My goal is very clear, and I wrote about it in Lean In, which is that women run half our companies and countries and men run half our homes. As much as I wish that could happen in four years, I don't think that's a likely time period. But I think it can happen sooner than we think. Part of it is having that aspiration and that goal. I think we too often suffer from the tyranny of low expectations.

Presenting leadership as a list of carefully defined qualities (like strategic, analytical, and performance-ori ented) no longer holds. Instead, true leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed.... Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.

I'm a feminist because I believe in women... it's a heavy word, feminism, but it's not one I think we should run from. I'm proud to be a feminist.