Sherry Lansing: Acting is one of the professions I most respect becaus...

The single most important thing you can do in business is to be yourself.

Sherry Lansing

being-yourself important business

The major difference I've found between the highly successful and the least successful is that the highly successful stick to it. They have staying power. Everybody fails. Everybody takes his knocks, but the highly successful keep coming back.

Sherry Lansing

differences sticks successful

If you don't wake up with something in your stomach every day that makes you think, "I want to make this movie," it'll never get made.

Sherry Lansing

perseverance make-you-think thinking

There are many qualities of a great leader. Passion is one, empathy is another, listening is another, decisiveness is another. I think a great leader makes people feel comfortable, so that they feel that they're allowed to be stupid, they're not afraid to give their opinions.

Sherry Lansing

passion stupid thinking

Listen, be respectful of others' opinions, be willing to change your mind - and then ultimately you have to make the decision. Decisiveness is very important.

Sherry Lansing

others-opinions decision mind

My advice to everybody - never give up and have great resiliency. Don't take the rejection personally, but listen if it’s intelligent and make changes if they’re needed and then move forward.

Sherry Lansing

giving-up intelligent moving

My mother, because of her life, had almost a contradictory way of viewing life. She had this great zest and joy for life and I think that I have that. The glass is always half full for me.

Sherry Lansing

glasses mother thinking

Success has many ways of coming to you. Sometimes it comes right away, and then the film's instantly forgotten. Sometimes you can't remember what won the Academy Award for best picture, and then you can remember the one that didn't. And then sometimes in the afterlife, films that were not successful at all become these giant successes.

Sherry Lansing

afterlife awards successful

The movie business was changing, I didn't want to turn 60 in the job. I picked 60 as an age where you are young enough to have a new life but not so young you can wait. And I had this incredible need: I had been so blessed in life and I wanted to give back. So I left Paramount with great joy, I have to say, and with great fondness for the memories I have in the movie business.

Sherry Lansing

blessed jobs memories

There's a Harvard Business School thing that says, 'Every 10 years you should replant yourself,' and the only way to keep young is to learn new things and keep curious.

Sherry Lansing

way years school

When you rule in a culture of fear, you're not getting the best out of people.

Sherry Lansing

culture people

This will sound like I grew up on another planet, except for those people who are past 55, 60 maybe. When I was growing up, my mother and her generation basically felt that you should only work as a way of passing time until you got married and had at least two children. And the only careers that were open for women at the time was teacher or nurse - which are fantastic careers, I mean fantastic and I actually am a former math teacher.

Sherry Lansing

mother teacher children

I see the joy in life and I see the joy in simple things. I over-compliment. I over-praise. I over-express my feelings toward people because I never got it in my family. I am the first to hug somebody, because I wasn't hugged.

Sherry Lansing

simple joy people

I felt, if I never did anything in my life but read scripts and synopsize them, I would be happy.

Sherry Lansing

scripts ifs would-be

I left Paramount at the ripe young age of sixty. A generation ago, that would have been retirement age. But my generation has more energy, more drive, and a greater life expectancy than any group of retirees before us. We are going to be here for two decades or more past 'retirement' age and we want to do something relevant in the so-called third act of our lives.

Sherry Lansing

retirement two past

We have many dreams and many different chapters in life and I think life is about chapters. For me, from the time I was pretty young, I always thought that if I was lucky enough to achieve my dreams and if I had financial security, at a certain point in my life I wanted to give back. I wanted, just corny as it sounds, to try and make the world a better place.

Sherry Lansing

dream giving thinking

We are all forever a work in progress. I mean, that is the truth. You are forever in your whole life a work in progress, and forever there is a 12-year-old that's driving in to work with you every day. And you are still on the school playground and you are still whatever it is in college or you are still wondering why someone didn't return your call or ask you out.

Sherry Lansing

college mean school

Everybody has to find it whatever helps. Religion is very helpful for people. A good friend is very helpful. A priest is very helpful. A rabbi is very helpful. You just have to find it. But when you get depressed or when you face a crisis, don't feel you have to do it alone.

Sherry Lansing

good-friend faces people

Two things were falling apart, my personal life, my professional life. And I realized that all those things were supposed to make me happy, but nothing could fill me up except myself. So I went into analysis. I went to see a doctor, to talk about my lack of self-esteem. I don't know how to say it better: my lack of self-esteem, my insecurity, and how these things were not going to fill me up. And I'd better fix myself and then find out what I liked. For me, therapy was the greatest gift I could ever give myself. There's nothing I could have done for myself that would've been better.

Sherry Lansing

self-esteem two fall

My father died at 42, of a heart attack. My mother was 32 then. She never wanted to be a victim. And that really resonated as a nine-year-old child. And one of the most revealing things was, very soon after my father died - he was in real estate and he owned some modest buildings - they came to my mother, the men that worked for him, and they said, "You don't have to worry. We will run the business and we will take care of you." And my mother said, "No, you won't. You will teach me how to run the business and I will take care of it and my children."

Sherry Lansing

mother running children