Agapi Stassinopoulos
When I ask powerful women what made them who they are (a question I've asked constantly over the years), they often tell me about their parents and then say, "Oh, my mother...!"
So when I read one mother's take on the topic of wealth, below, it struck a familiar chord. The passage is from Unbinding the Heart, a new book by Agapi Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington's sister. I knew a little about Mrs. Stassinopoulos from conversations Arianna and I have had, as well as from an interview that TV talk show host/media entrepreneur Chelsea Handler did with her on stage at last fall's Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Larger than life and perpetually optimistic, Arianna's mother married a larger than life newspaper publisher—and "huge philanderer," as Arianna recalls her father. When Arianna was 11 years old, she convinced her mother to leave him--and from then on, with little money to raise two daughters in Athens, made the girls believe that they had wealth and opportunity galore.
Arianna went on to create, among other things, the Huffington Post. She sold her startup to AOL (AOL) for $315 million last year. So, it's hardly the case that she and younger sis Agapi lack an appreciation of money. But as Agapi writes in Unbinding the Heart, they learned early on that money isn't what life is about:
I knew that my mother was different from my father in some basic way, because she treated all people the same, and she herself behaved the same, no matter whom she was with. She had no status handicap, and it freed her. My father was much more attuned to hierarchy, and I saw how it hindered him, though he was a brilliant and exceptional man. One Sunday morning after he and his friend drove off, I burst out to my mother with the innocence of a puzzled nine-year-old. "Mummy," I asked her, "are we rich?"
In a matter-of-fact tone that I can still hear, confident in her knowledge, she said, "We are very, very wealthy." And then she gave me the Talk--not the sex talk but the wealth talk. "Being rich doesn't mean you are wealthy. Being rich means you have a lot of money. Being wealthy means you value the gifts you have and you develop them. Wealth means that you have everything you need, and that you share it, too. It means being generous with what you have, not living in fear of losing what you have, and not comparing it to what anyone else has."
Her passion was palpable as she spoke about these ideas. "Having intelligence is wealth. Being curious about life is wealth. Ethics is wealth--it is the integrity you have in all your relationships. Having friends who care for you and love you, and whom you care for and love, that is wealth. Taking care of yourself and being healthy is wealth, and so is having respect for yourself and your fellow human beings. Being educated, having a thirst for learning, being able to go to good schools with inspiring teachers who will help you cultivate your talents, is wealth too--the most important kind, because without that, it really doesn't matter what else you have."
She went on: "The arts and culture are wealth. The artists of the world are all wealthy. They have gifts that money can never buy. And if you know how wealthy you are, then you can go make money—but only if you want to."
Sheryl Sandberg keeps on giving. Journalistically, that is. Last week, here on Postcards, we riffed on the New York Times profile of Sandberg, whose ambition for young women in business seems to match her ambition for Facebook, where she is COO. That is: Just do it...take over the world.
On Saturday, CNN.com ran a story titled "How to have more Sheryl Sandbergs." The key? "Peer influence," posed the authors, Courtney E. MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 14, 2012 12:14 PM ET
Credit: Ana Schechter
The best entrepreneurs see a gap in the market and fill it. Today, the start of Fashion Week in New York, is a good time to share lessons from Mona Bijoor, who spotted inefficiency in the fashion industry and created a company to fix it. With $2.25 million from Battery Ventures and angel investors, Bijoor, 34, is building an online marketplace for boutiques and brands to buy and MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 8, 2012 11:59 AM ET
Credit: maryannerussell.com
Sunday brought another glowing profile of Sheryl Sandberg. The Facebook COO, who is No. 12 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list, is on a PR roll. Though being called "the Justin Bieber of tech" in the New York Times comes close, I think, to jumping the shark image-wise.
The Times article honed in on Sandberg's third "job" besides playing backup to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and wife and mother MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 6, 2012 12:25 PM ET
Photo by Peter Bick
When I read in the New York Times last Sunday that Indianapolis won the opportunity to host the Super Bowl by sending a bunch of eighth graders to appeal to NFL team owners across the U.S., I wanted to know more about this tale of masterful persuasion. So I called Allison Melangton. the president and CEO of the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, and asked her if MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 3, 2012 12:03 PM ET
Who is Facebook's highest-paid executive? Sheryl Sandberg.
The Facebook COO received a base salary of just $300,000 last year, but Sandberg's total comp turned out to be $30.8 million, according to Facebook's pre-IPO filings. Meanwhile, her boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, got $500,000 in salary and some $1.5 million in total comp. (Don't feel too sorry for Zuckerberg. The 27-year-old boss owns more than a quarter of the company he co-founded--a stake MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 2, 2012 11:53 AM ET
Photo by Jack Hutcheson
Her daughter Susan is the most powerful woman at Google (GOOG). Her daughter Anne started 23andMe, a company that dissects your DNA makeup. Her daughter Janet is a PhD anthropologist and epidemiologist.
You have to figure that Esther Wojcicki taught her daughters pretty well.
The mother of Silicon Valley's well-known Wojcicki sisters is, in fact, being honored today, Digital Learning Day, as one of a small group of "great MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 1, 2012 9:06 AM ET
When I ran into Glenn Close at the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) annual meeting last spring, she told me that the movie she had just completed, Albert Nobbs, was one of the most challenging projects of her career.
This morning, Close got an Academy Award nomination for her offbeat role in the film: Close plays a woman posing as a man in order to get a job and survive in nineteenth-century Dublin. MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 24, 2012 10:47 AM ET
Lisa Suennen is one of the few big-deal venture capitalists in health care. Not that this distinction makes her happy or proud.
Suennen, whose Psilos Group has $577 million under management, would rather see more of her kind in her industry, as she wrote today in a Guest Post on my colleague Dan Primack's Term Sheet. Attending JPMorgan's Healthcare Conference last week in San Francisco, Suennen noticed that only about 10% MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 17, 2012 2:39 PM ET
Chelsea Handler showed us a new side of her media brand-ness last night on the premiere of the NBC (CMCSA) sitcom Are You There, Chelsea? The standup comic/late-night TV host/best-selling author/rising-star entrepreneur plays main character Chelsea's pregnant and proper sister on the show.
Let's be clear, this is not Handler's fantasy life. At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, Arianna Huffington tried her best to convince Handler of the MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 12, 2012 11:23 AM ET
For the latest on the most influential women in business, philanthropy, government, and the arts, like us on Facebook. 
In a funny and candid interview, Google VP Marissa Mayer explains how she got to the top. Watch
Xerox CEO Ursula Burns shares how she once accepted a job with Dell but ended up staying with Xerox. Watch
Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). Since its launch in 1998, Pattie has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" cover package.
A specialist at dissecting larger-than-life personalities, she has also profiled former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and countless CEOs.
Pattie co-chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big brand companies.
In Pattie's blog, Postcards, she provides insight into the lives of super-achievers through commentary, career advice, and Guest Posts by CEOs and other leaders.
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Fortune Most Powerful Women
Sheryl Sandberg:
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