Children are much more influenced by what their parents do than what they say. Sherry Lansing is a perfect example.

When Sherry chattered about becoming an actress, like other stereotypical moms in the 1950s, Margot Heimann Duhl told her daughter to focus on becoming a housewife. But necessity had forced Margot off traditional paths. When she’d fled Nazi Germany for America at 17, she’d had to be self-reliant, learning to speak English and working as a dressmaker. And when Sherry’s father, real-estate investor David Duhl, died of a sudden heart attack when she was nine, Margot stepped up again. The grieving widow went to his office and announced she was taking over the family business. On being informed by a male office manager that she couldn’t possibly do that because she didn’t know anything about real estate, she replied, “Teach me. I can do it.”

So Margot may have told her daughter to find a husband and settle down, but she taught her she could do whatever she wanted. So Sherry, who later took the surname of her stepfather, graduated cum laude from Northwestern with majors in math, English, and theater, then launched her acting and modeling career.

But Lansing didn’t stop at achieving her childhood dream. Sharing her mother’s fearless willingness to go where no woman had gone before, in 1980 she became president of 20^th Century Fox—the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. After 12 years at Fox came another dozen as chairman of Paramount. Among the films the she brought to the screen: Chariots of Fire; Fatal Attraction; The Accused; Braveheart; Titanic; the Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Indiana Jones film series; and Forrest Gump, a story that had languished for 10 years waiting for a studio chief willing to take a chance on it. She left the film industry in 2004 to run the Sherry Lansing Foundation, which raises funds for cancer research, and is a cofounder of Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C).

Other thoughts on fearlessly pursuing your dreams:

“Fearless minds climb soonest into crowns.”

—William Shakespeare, playwright and poet

“Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.”

—John Maynard Keynes, economist

“Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.”

—Samuel Johnson, author

“One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often. Whether the statement be true or false, it comes to be dominating thought in one’s mind.”

—Robert Collier, writer and publisher

“I don’t think anything is unrealistic if you believe you can do it.”

—Mike Ditka, professional football player and coach

“Have confidence that if you have done a little thing well, you can do a bigger thing well, too.”

—David Storey, novelist and playwright

“There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.”

—Orison Swett Marden, author and magazine publisher

“You can do what you want to do. You can be what you want to be.”

—David Thomas, founder of Wendy’s Restaurants