Success Quote by Sheryl Sandberg

Power, dressed up as self-help. Sandberg's line trades in a quietly transactional view of relationships: "value" is the lever that moves other people's behavior. It's not really about personal worth in the moral sense; it's about perceived leverage in a system that rations attention, patience, and compromise. The grammar does the work. "When you're more valuable" treats value as a variable you can increase, like a skill set or a market cap. "The people around you will do more" implies effort is not freely given but negotiated. "Make it work" stays conveniently vague, letting the listener project anything onto it: a marriage, a team, a career, a seat at the table.

The intent reads like pragmatic coaching for environments where merit is supposed to matter but power actually does. In boardrooms and high-status social circles, people smooth conflict for the colleague who ships results, has options, or carries reputational gravity. Sandberg isn't romanticizing that reality; she's pointing at it, arguably normalizing it. The subtext is a warning and a strategy: if you want support, become costly to lose.

Context matters. Coming from the face of Lean In-era corporate feminism, it echoes the era's faith that individual optimization can bend institutions. It's bracingly compatible with Silicon Valley logic: improve your "value", increase your bargaining power, watch incentives shift. The cynicism is also the risk. It can sound like a permission slip for conditional care, where loyalty follows utility. In that world, being "valuable" buys effort - until it doesn't.