Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Sallie Krawcheck

I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

Hard work most often leads to success, but it's not every day, and it's not every week. It will pay off at different times over the course of your career.

What you hear and what the research shows is that gentlemen negotiate for their first job. Women do not negotiate from their first job and on. And I tell women there is no H.R. fairy godmother. There might be, but you better not count on it.

First, pay off your high-interest-rate debt. If you have student loan debt - that's low interest rate; that has a tax benefit - you can leave that out. A mortgage can be an OK one. Credit card debt is poison. That needs to be paid off right away.

To empower women, power must be given to them, presumably by an entity that already has it. And that entity is the patriarchy. This also implies that women must be on the receiving end, waiting - politely - to be empowered. Very Victorian-era courtship, isn't it?

The 'aha' moment came one to me one morning when I was applying my mascara, and I realized that the retirement crisis is actually a woman's crisis: Women live longer than men yet retire with less money.

I love to talk. I love to share. I love to vent. But I prefer action.

On Wall Street, the industry in which I grew up, a culture in which 'my word is my bond' shifted over the past few decades toward one where the big print can say 'Free' while the small print gives the real costs.

Your career is not going to go the way you planned. It is impossible at the age of 23 to pick the right industry, the right company, and you can visualize what you're going to be doing in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, but chances are that it's going to be something quite different. So remain open to opportunities and change.

I make it a priority to keep in touch with people with whom I've worked in the past. And I'm fortunate, because I've worked with some terrific folks.

Stop hoping for a promotion that's not coming. Instead, start a business at which you want to work.

In terms of challenges, I think finding the right people to maximize the chances the business will succeed is the hardest thing. You can crunch the numbers any way you want, but at the end of the day, you really need good employees and investors - and they aren't always easy to find.

Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.

As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel ownership over every aspect of your business because you're putting your reputation, your money, and other people's money on the line. Oh, and you're sleeping, breathing, and eating your passion project - that, too. But if you try to do it all yourself, you're almost certain to fail.

If you are going to fire this person or hire that person, do it all in a concentrated period. The Band-Aid gets ripped off, and everybody goes back to work.

Like many entrepreneurs, I never have two days that are alike. One thing that's consistent is I wake up early, around 4:30 A.M. It's my most productive time of day because I can think and work uninterrupted.

I have a very simple point of view, which is, I'm going to be alive for some amount of time; I don't know how long that's going to be. Then I'm going to be dead for a really, really long time. Right? You need to squeeze everything you can out of this time when you're alive.

You may find it more relaxing to work with people just like you, but entrepreneurship is about finding new approaches to problems, and discomfort can be an important part of that process.

We shouldn't think anyone needs a Ph.D. in advanced investing in order to begin to invest.

The Ellevest target client is the professional woman who either has her own money or has agency over her family's money. She is among the 75 million women in the U.S. workforce who want to take financial control and is looking for a straightforward way to achieve her dreams on her own terms.

One of my passions is women in business and helping women to get ahead in business. For women, that feedback loop can be broken. Women won't get as much feedback from male bosses as men will get. Therefore, they have to make an extra effort, whether that is unfortunate, good, bad, indifferent.

Investing isn't a game to be won. At the end of the day, it's a way to achieve your big goals, like buying that home, starting that business, and retiring on your own terms.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Obviously, a dollar invested in your 20s is worth so much more than a dollar invested in your 60s.

Women bring some great qualities to work. We bring risk-awareness. We bring a greater focus on relationships. We bring more holistic decision-making than gentlemen do. We bring a more long-term perspective than gentlemen do. We tend to look for meaning and purpose in our jobs to a greater degree than gentlemen do.

In the old world of business, there was often just one seat at the leadership table for women, two at best. That meant that only so many women could advance. But in a world where women recognize the power that they own - and where technology can upend the traditional rules of engagement - one woman winning doesn't mean another loses.

I'm a Weeble. Remember Weebles? The toy whose tagline was, 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down?' I'm resilient. Oh, and I work really hard.

If you are a senior woman in business, you intuitively know two things: If a white man promotes a woman or a person of color, he gets credit for it. If a woman says great things about a woman, you get dinged for it. Research is clear on this.

The whole icon of a bull that stands for Wall Street - you couldn't come up with an image of a more male environment. Women feel that the brand doesn't speak to them.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

I never talk about my money! It is interesting how awkward it is to talk about it, even though I talk about it in the abstract every day.

People just haven't saved enough for retirement. And they're going to outlive their money.

There are a lot of things in business that are completely out of your control, but hard work isn't one of them.

We just haven't had enough women in senior roles on Wall Street overall - fewer women in the investment banking function overall as well.

The only time in my career I've lost sleep - wake up 3:30 in the morning, and you know you're not going back to sleep - is when I've been an entrepreneur. Even in the financial crisis.

You know those days at the office when you used to come in and not really do much? You don't get days like that as an entrepreneur. If you don't do the work you need to, nothing happens that needs to. It's that simple.

My low point was after being reorganized out of running Merrill Lynch. That dismissal deeply contradicted my sense of fairness, since, at the time, my team and I had done what we were brought in to do: We had turned Merrill Lynch around from the depths of the financial crisis.

People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.

A dysfunctional team means a dysfunctional - and likely doomed - company.

My kindest interpretation of my younger self is, 'Boy, was I busy.' I had two kids, a husband, two stepkids. I mean, how many darn things can a person do at the end of the day?

If your idea is truly innovative, you're going to hear from the naysayers. After all, if it really were such a good idea, someone would have already done it, right?

Leadership is a lot of hard work. I hoped, when I was younger, that I would just be a natural leader or that it was something that was innate, but it is really a learned skill.

One thing I never thought about in my big-company job? Cash flow. When your business has billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and you can find yourself in real jeopardy fast.

We all know money is power. And women won't be equal with men until we are financially equal with men. Getting more money into the hands of women is good for women, but it's also good for their families, for the economy, and for society.

Assume the best intent in others around you. You will often be right, and even when you're not, people can rise to your view of them. Not always, but enough that I believe it's worth it.

Most financial questions don't have one right answer - just an answer that's right for you.

I've managed many people in my career. I've managed very diverse teams. And it's interesting because what I've found over time is that when it would come to bonus time or raise time, I would hear from the gentlemen, 'I want to make X.' I don't think I ever heard from a woman who worked for me, 'I want to make X.'

I'm about impact. One can make impact if they run a big business with a lot of zeroes. I've done that. One can also make an impact when you're a research analyst, where it's you and your associate. I've done that.

If you don't share information among your startup's team, then it'll be just about a coincidence if product, marketing, and engineering are ever aligned. Those odds are too low to succeed.

I've taken a few public hits in my career, and I never hid the pain of it from my children. Nor did I hide the regrouping and rethinking that occurred after each one. After all, that process allowed me to re-emerge and go on to build a more impactful - and more engaging - career path than the one I had been knocked off of.

As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.

When I feel risk-averse, I am much more likely to surround myself with middle-aged, professional, southern females; I just am.

I never really considered myself much of a feminist until I left Wall Street. I did all the right things - such as put together gender-diverse teams - but feminism wasn't deep in my bones.

The research indicates that when we women invest, we women do tend to be more patient, take a longer-term perspective and as a result of it, tend to be better investors than men. But the messages we get are that investing is sort of 'the guys' world.'

Follow the money at all costs, and you might wind up regretting it.

Networking has been cited as the number one unwritten rule of success in business. Who you know really impacts what you know.

Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.

If you aren't committed to diversity of thought, you have no business launching a startup.

Whatever your income level is, save as much as you can - up to 20 percent, but more if you can - and invest it. Put that into an IRA; put that into a brokerage account.

Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.