Oprah Winfrey on Career, Life, and Leadership

and everyone has it, you align your personality with your purpose and no one can touch you and you will wake up every day and you will be excited. You're like, Oh my God, another day! Is so big! Because everyone has a purpose. So all you have to do is find out what that is. Your real job is to discover why you are really here and then dedicate yourself to doing it. Okay. That's all. So we all know now what we have to do, right? Just wait. Yes. So Oprah, thank you very much. Let's answer some questions?

Well, yes, that's what I wanted to say. I would love to put it on. Everyone has a class at 1:15, right? Okay, I'll get you out of here. They told me harshly. One o'clock. Yes. But we think so, do we have a first Twitter question? Throughout the session, the first question asked today was Matt Sucedo, who asked: will you marry me? . Oh, it looks like it's up there. Matt, where's the ring? Matt, do we need marriage? Gosh, I have to say it's going to be a great prenup between us. What else do you have, Andre? And then we had Javier Hernández, who asked: Oprah, who has been your favorite interviewee and why?

Well, actually, I would have to say there are so many over the years and the truth is that the people whose names I can't even remember and who you probably wouldn't remember, have been the most revealing, the most impactful. I mean, seeing people come out of tragedies and define triumph for themselves. Those people, really, have been the ones who really formed me and made me a better human being. I once did an interview with a woman and actually with Doctor Phil, where she had come on the show and then she was planning to kill herself afterwards, she said, because her daughter had been murdered eight years before and she couldn't get over it and she just wanted to come on the show.

Oprah and talk about it. And Phil said to him: Why do you spend all your time mourning, all these years mourning death, instead of celebrating

life

? You let one day define your daughter's entire

life

and she looked at it and said, you know, she's never thought about it that way before with tears in her eyes. He could feel that, the change in her. So the biggest moments for me have been when I can literally see that someone has made a change in the way they see themselves in the world or, you know, what we call now, an aha moment.

Those, I live for those, those are my favorite interviews, but more recently, last week I interviewed Pharrell. Oh Lord. I was so happy. But you made him cry. I didn't make him cry. I didn't make him cry, Amanda. But she cried but they were tears of happiness. Yes, I would have to say. I don't really try to make people cry and I think we literally cut a lot because he started crying ugly. He went into ugly crying. You could tell it was real. Yes, it was very real and we said: we have to save his brother.

The brother cannot go out into the world with the ugly cry. It's okay to have a little snort, but then don't do it. But I could also feel it. I mean, I get it, you know why? Because he simply loved him. He just loved it. Anyone who watched that interview, if you liked him a little bit before, you really loved him afterwards because he's a person who is absolutely connected here. And he, yes, he knows the purpose of it. Yes. Yes, he does. Oh, he's very connected to it and when he saw it, he started crying when he saw the videos of people from all over the world dancing to the happy song.

There is also a version made here. Here? Yes. Did you guys make one too? Yeah, I think some of the MBAs, right? Raise your hand if you're in it. Yes! Didn't it make you happy to do it? Yeah, he watched that video, like 30 seconds of video of people in all these different countries and the name of the countries was at the top. He just felt the excitement and the impact of using his life in such a way that now you can touch all of those people, which is really what we all seek to do and we all have the ability to do it. , whatever level you are at.

At any level, and I always tell people, oh, I have a great stage. Some people have a smaller stage. Some people know, what is your stage? Now let's take one from the audience. Yes. Let's do it. Alright. Here we go. Introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Kirsten. I am a second year MBA student here at JSB. This week at JSB we are hosting something called Climate Week to raise awareness about climate change among business students here. He's interviewed people like Leo, Al Gore, and President Obama about this really important topic. So I want you to give me an idea: how can we raise awareness around issues like climate change, which are important, but are also very complex and politicized?

We came prepared. We came prepared today, huh? Wow. I don't know the answer to that question. Don't know. If I had known that, we would have turned it into a club and I would have had everyone join my environmental club. Now, I don't know, that's such a complex and beautiful question, and the fact that you're asking it or involved in the process of trying to find the answer excites me, because that's what would happen here at Stanford. So I don't really have an answer to that question. . Thank you. Thanks, do we have time for one more?

You have to do it because you can't end a question without an answer. We have one. I came here to be stumped, yes. Hi Oprah, my name is Melissa and I wanted to know, how do you think about balancing altruism with selfishness? Selflessness with selfishness. Why do you ask me that? It's kind of a tension between putting yourself first and also taking care of others. Well. Well, I would say this. No, no, well, everyone has heard of the oxygen mask. The truth is that you have nothing to give that you don't already have. So you have to stay full.

That's your job. You know, one of my daughters is here today from the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Get up Shenay, so everyone can see you. You will soon finish your first year. Oh my god, it's your first year. I tell my girls all the time that their real job is to figure out where their power base is and work on aligning their personality, the gifts they have to give with the real reason who they are. here. That's the first thing you have to do: work on yourself, fill yourself and keep your cup full. Stay full. I used to be afraid of that.

She used to be afraid, especially, of people who would say, oh, she's so stuck up. Mm, she's so stuck up and now I accept it. I consider it a compliment that I am full of myself because only when you are full. I'm full, I'm overflowing. My cup is overflowing. I have a lot. I have a lot to offer and a lot to give and I'm not afraid to honor myself, you know? It's miraculous when you think about it. First of all, for me, my father and mother never married. They once had sex under an oak tree because she was wearing a poodle skirt in 1953. .

And my dad to this day says: I want to know what was under that skirt. That is what i want to know. He wanted to know what was under the skirt. They didn't really have a relationship. She wanted one but you know, he went under her skirt and that was it and one time, under the oak tree, bam. Renaissance. The woman is born. That's why I know my life is bigger than that. My life has to be bigger, like yours is, bigger than a moment, bigger than a poodle skirt. It is much bigger. The design, the reason I'm here is much bigger than, oh, I think I want to see what's underneath.

So the ability to care for that, to honor that, to honor yourself and that which is bigger than yourself, that which was the reason you are here. There is no altruism in that. Only through that do you have the ability to offer yourself, your entire being, your full expression of who you are, to the rest of the world. Then I remember the first time I had a life coach. They were not called that at the time, but experts in who shared with our audience, women. She made a list and said where are you on the list?

And literally in that audience, women booed her when she said, put yourself at the top of the list. This was in 1992. In 1992, the idea of ​​being first on your own list made people say, how dare you? She doesn't have children. I said, she didn't say to abandon your children and go running in the streets. She simply said, put yourself at the top of the list. Take care of yourself. Honor yourself. Stop the crazy mental chatter in your head that tells you all the time that you're not good enough because that's the number one problem, I've also discovered, with everyone.

The reason people say, you know, what's that like? How is that? It's because you want to know how you measure up. Well, knowing that you're just here, you're just here, however that sperm, bam, hit that egg, whatever happened to you, that being here is such a miraculous thing and that your real job is to honor that, is to honor that. . And the sooner you realize that, oh, wow, wow, I'm one of the lucky ones. I have to be here. So how can you continue to prepare yourself to live the highest, fullest, truest expression of yourself as a human being?

I just want to end this: there are no mistakes. There really aren't any, because you have a supreme destiny. When you are in your little mind, in your little personality mind or you are not centered, you don't really know who you are but you are coming from something bigger and bigger. We are all really equal. You don't know, you get nervous, you stress all the time, wishing something was something that isn't. There is a supreme moment of destiny that calls into your life. Your job is to feel that, hear that, know that, and sometimes when you're not listening, you get sidetracked.

You get into the wrong marriage, the wrong relationship, you take the wrong job. Yes, but everything leads to the same path. There are no wrong roads. There are none. In reality, there is no such thing as failure, because failure is just that, trying to take you in another direction. So you get as much from your losses as you do from your victory because the losses are there to wake you up. Losses are to say, fool, that's why you go to school, so CBS can call you. So when you understand that you don't let yourself be completely thrown off balance by a grade or a circumstance because your life is bigger than any experience and if I had, I always ask people at Super Soul Sunday to tell me, what would happen?

Do you tell your younger self? Everyone says one way or another, I would have said, relax. Relax. It will be OK. It's really going to be okay because even if you're on a detour right now and that's how you know, when you're not comfortable with yourself, when you feel like that, that's the sign that you need to move. in another direction. Don't let yourself get sidetracked, keep veering off course. When you feel off course, that's the key. How do I turn around? So when everyone was talking about when I started this network, if I had known, my goodness, how hard it would be.

The way to overcome the challenge is to sit still and ask yourself what the right next step is. Not thinking about, oh, I've got all this in, what's the next right move and then from that space making the next right move and the next right move and not being overwhelmed by it because you know your life is bigger than that. moment. You know that you are not defined by what someone says is failure for you because failure is just there to point you in a different direction and that's all the time I have right now. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you. Good job! Thank you. Yes! Thank you. Yes! Good job! Yeah! Good job! Wow!