People Don’t Search for You; They Search for Your Idea
Google the words Sheryl and Sandberg right now in another tab. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
What’s the first search result you read? It’s not Sheryl or Sandberg, is it? It’s not even a different Sheryl Sandberg. Her name brings up two completely different words, which should indicate a mistake. There’s a glitch in Google.
Except there’s not and the leading search result for Sheryl plus Sandberg is perfectly understandable and fitting the moment we see it. The two modest replacements are the words Lean and In, which together are the title of her book: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will To Lead. The dot org built around her book stands in for her name.
Everything else that makes a typical Web presence—her Wikipedia entry, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, and TED talk—follows accordingly.
These search results are not always the same or in the same order either. Online searches are fluid for each of us on our timelines and in our bubbles, while different days and news headlines complicate her story. Facebook, Sheryl’s employer, is regularly in the middle of controversy. There was the tragic loss of her young husband. There’s been another successful book.
Above all of this though, always near the top of Sheryl’s results, is her first message. I’ve made this example search for students for years now and it still holds true as I post this. Sheryl Sandberg equals Lean In. You can search the other way around too. Lean In equals Sheryl Sandberg. She leads with her strongest example of her voice.
Lean and In aren’t SAT words. Sandberg certainly wasn’t the first to unite them. She owns them, not because she has a copyright or a team of lawyers, but because she imbued the cliché phrase with a new meaning for a specific audience that became a best-selling idea. To make the world more equal for women, women must “lean in” to ambition, leadership, and any and all conversations.
Most of us know Lean In through that strange process of osmosis that keeps us in tune with the current culture. I admit I’ve only read her introduction standing in the bookstore.
Yet the two words are interactive. Indeed, the title itself is an invitation to join. Lean In is not just a thesis and the beginning of a set of keywords from an abstract for study. It is also a tweet, a hashtag, and a hyperlink, inviting the audience to click and share. It is her “avatar” trolling the status quo, her “algorithm” seeking a more effective logic and method, and her “wiki” inviting more research and collaboration.
I’m sure the two words did not come easy. Sheryl wrote drafts of her book to find this phrase. Even if it came to her in an aha moment, that moment was the culmination of years of experience and living as a woman in the corporate world.
Her job alone didn’t give her this voice in the world, nor did the Internet. She has a voice because she chose a focus and a thesis, a beat and a headline, a classroom and a lesson.
She has a voice because she defined her idea.