Oprah Winfrey 30 Minutes for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE

Knowing who you are. Knowing who you are. Being able to answer this question, who am I and what do I want? You know, many times when I go out of the country I am baffled by that question to explain what is your occupation. I've stood there for ten minutes. Well, am I a talk show host? Well, I'm more than a talk show host. Am I a businesswoman? I'm a businesswoman. I'm more than a businesswoman. Am I an entrepreneur? I'm more than an entrepreneur. So I just leave it blank or self-employed. So I'm not asking for the roles that you play as daughters. I'm not asking that question. What are the roles that you play as a daughter, as a friend, as a sister? You're going to be a lawyer. You're going to teach. You're going to be a pharmacist. I'm asking the bigger question of who am I? Who am I really? My answer is I am God's child. I am that which is born of all that is. I am, as Pierre de Chardin said, a spiritual being having a human experience. Come trailing the breath of the ancestors yet but trailing the breath of the angels and understanding that because I am connected to the source of all that is, all that is possible is possible for me. That's who I am. And what do I want? I don't want to just be successful in the world. I don't want to just make a mark or have a legacy. The answer to that question for me is I want to fulfill the highest, truest expression of myself as a human being. I want to fulfill the promise that the Creator dreamed when he dreamed the cells that made up me. What do I want? You must have some kind of vision for your life. Even if you don't know the plan, you have to have a direction in which you choose to go. I never was the kind of woman who liked to get in a car and just go for a ride. I had a boyfriend who would say, let's just go for a ride. I want to know where are we going? Do we have a destination? Is there a plan? Are we just riding? What I've learned is that's a great metaphor for life. You want to be in the driver's seat of your own life because if you're not, life will drive you. Knowing who you really are in this space and time that we embody, that's number one. What do you want? Who are you? Number two, you must find a way to serve. Martin Luther King said that not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great because greatness is determined by service. Now we live in a world where everybody wants to be famous and where we admire people for just being famous. We think being known brings us value. The truth is all of that will fade in time. The real truth is that service and significance, service and the significance that you bring to your service is that which is lasting. So to be able to, whatever your occupation or job or talent or gift is, our honorees today getting doctorate degrees, two apparently opposite fields, HIV and AIDS and the spoken word. But what they have in common is service. Using the spoken word in service to community and the world. Using your knowledge and information about HIV and AIDS and medicine in service to the world. And if you look at all the most successful people in the world, whether they know it or not, they have that paradigm of service. Everybody's talking about Mark Zuckerberg and IPO. Service. Jay-Z, Rapid. Service through the word to people through song. For many years, I was really just happy to be on TV and people would stop and say, Oh, you on TV? Yeah, I'm on TV. I like being on TV. It's a nice job. Then I went back and I took a long look at what it was I was doing on TV and made a decision that I was no longer going to just be on TV, but I was going to use TV as a platform, as a force for good and not be used by TV. And I will tell you, my decision to make that significant change in the way I operated on television, using television as a service, changed my career exponentially. Service through medicine, service through art. Using whatever it is you produce, your product, as a way of giving back to the world. When you shift the paradigm of whatever it is you choose to do to service and you bring significance to that, success will, I promise you, follow you. Service and significance equals success. That's number two. Number three, it's so simple, but so hard to do. Always do the right thing. Be excellent. People notice. Think of how you notice. You go to Taco Bell, somebody gives you extra napkin and some sauce, you notice. You want to go back to that person because even at Taco Bell, excellence shows itself. Be excellent. Let excellence be your brand. Everybody talks about building a brand. I never even knew what that was. When people say you're a brand, I would say, no, I'm just Oprah. What I recognize now is that my choice to, in every way, in every example, in every experience, to do the right thing and the excellent thing is what has created the brand. And what I know is that when you are excellent, you become unforgettable. People remember you. You stand out regardless of what it is. You become an unforgettable woman and that is what we all want. We want to be unforgettable and not forgettable. So doing the right thing, even when nobody knows you're doing the right thing, will always bring the right thing to you. I promise you that. Why? Because the third law of motion is always at work. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. That is so true in all of our lives. That's what Newton said. Celia in The Color Purple said it, everything you even try to do to me, already done to you. Everything you even try to do to me, already done to you. So you don't have to worry about revenge or getting back at somebody, making sure they pay. You just have to do the right thing and the right thing will follow you, even when people don't support it. I remember many times on my show, there are many shows y'all never saw, and the reason you didn't see them is because I got the last vote. And I remember 2010, my team, hardest working team in television had done this interview with a woman who turns out she was a Sunday school teacher by day and a sex addict at night. They were like, you won't believe it, we got her going out, we got her with the men, and we get to show her, and she was willing to show us everything. I sat down with the woman for an interview that was taped, and during the process of the interview, I said, why are you doing this? And she said, oh, I want to help people. I want to tell my story and I want to help people. I said, do you have children? She says, yes, I have a 10-year-old son. I knew right then this is never gonna see the light of day. So we got off the air, and I said to the lady, we are not going to air that show. And she said, why? My producer said, why? She knew she was being filmed. She knew what she was saying. She knows what you... I said, because her son will never get over it. Her son will never get over it. And it's not worth a rating point to me. Not worth a rating point to me to know that there's a 10-year-old boy who's destroyed because his mother went on the Oprah Winfrey show and told all her business. You do the right thing, even when other people think it may not be. And oftentimes, when you make a decision to do the right thing, immediately you're faced with doubt. Was that the right thing? Was that the right decision? I don't know. Was that the right thing? You always know it's the right thing when in the end, there is peace. You are rewarded by peace in knowing that you did the right thing. The most important thing I have come to know in doing the right thing and making the right choices is understanding what we talked about yesterday. All of you leaving here have the potential for enormous success. There's a price that comes with that. People don't always like you and they're not always happy for you. And if you surround yourself with people who are not accustomed to your success, they become fearful. They become scared because you are reflecting back something to them that they don't recognize. Now they're not gonna say, you know, I'm very fearful because you're reflecting back to me something I don't recognize. They're going to say, you know what they're gonna say? They're gonna say, who she thinks she is? Who she thinks she is? That only happens when you are around people who do not mean and want and aspire to the best for you. People who want the best for you want you to be your best. So my greatest advice to you is to surround yourself with people who are going to fill your cup until your cup runneth over. So when people say you're so full of yourself, you can say, yeah, yes, I'm full. I'm so full my cup runneth over. And to know that once your cup runneth over, you cannot spend your life with your gallon-sized offerings, offering them to pint-sized people. You have got to surround yourself with gallon-sized people who can hang in the same company with you so that you're not offering your gallons to those little pints out there who can't hold it anyway. Choice to Change the World. I love that song. I love hearing you all sing that song. And what I know for sure is that the biggest choices begin and end with you, your internal big questions. Who do I want to be in the world? My relationship to source energy, to all that is God. I'm not talking about what you believe in God. I'm talking about your experience of that which is all life, which is divine and universal. I'm talking about the big deal, being connected and aligned with that. When you are tuned in and charged into that, whenever you feel empty, you go inside yourself and you connect to the source and you know that all things are possible. To know that and to choose to do the right thing in service and significance. I promise you, you will create a vessel of service for yourself first because you have to honor yourself first. You have to give to yourself first otherwise you have nothing to give away. You will create a vessel for yourself, for your family, your community, and the world. And those three things will not only lead you to a blessed life. I stand as a witness. My life is so blessed I can't even take it in sometimes. It will lead you not just to a gifted life and a rewarding life that fills you up, but a sweet life. That's what you want. You want the sweetness. You want it to be so sweet so that even when the storms come, and they will, you'll know this too shall pass. The storm is passing over and you shall not be moved because you know who you are. When you can do that, grace will follow you. Grace and glory. And when they see you coming, it ought to make them proud. I have spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours talking to spiritual leaders and teachers, and not just spiritual leaders and teachers who have been deemed so, but thousands of people who came from levels of dysfunction, who came from levels of pain, who were suffering, who were challenged in their progression of trying to be the best human beings they could be, and they allowed themselves the opportunity to come on our show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and share their stories. I am one who believes in the sharing of stories. I believe in the process of sharing, period, because I know that all life gets better when you share it. And those thousands of people who have been guests on the show, and many of them who are also audience members, have been my greatest teachers. And I would say that one of my gifts, one of my gifts that I've had since I was a little girl growing up in Mississippi, being raised on a tiny little acre farm with my grandmother, is that I knew how to pay attention. I was a great observer of life, and I grew up believing that I was indeed for sure God's child. It's because every Sunday I sat in our little church down the road, a dirt road from where my grandmother lived, no running water, no electricity, but the church is down the road from us, and we could hear the singing as I was getting dressed for Sunday school. And I'd always sit on the left-hand side, the left pew, in the second row. And I would listen to the preacher preach about the Lord thy God is a loving God, and sometimes he would say the Lord thy God is a jealous God. But most important, I heard him say, you are God's child, and through God all things are possible. And I literally took him at his word, so that by the time I was leaving, had to leave my grandmother because she became ill, and I was sent to live in Milwaukee with my mother, who had two other children, I got beat up on the playground. Because when people would ask me, who is your daddy? I would say, Jesus is my daddy. Sometimes he's my brother, and God is my father. But what I now know, and have learned, that my view of God, although I call that God in a box, and all that, although that has, my vision of God has expanded to be inclusive of all things, all, all. God is all, God is law, God is all, in all things. Not just the guy standing up in the, sitting up with the beard. And now that that view of God has expanded, I still understand how important it was for a little colored girl, we weren't even black yet, not to mention African American, you know what I mean, Harry. A little colored girl in Mississippi, for whom there was no vision of hope or possibility. My grandmother's greatest desire for me, as she had been a maid, and her mother before her had been a maid, her greatest desire was that I would grow up one day and be able to do the same. And she wished for me that I would be able to, as she used to say, I hope you get some good white folks when you grow up. I hope you get good white folks who treat you good. So my grandmother would have no idea of the life that I now lead with good white folks who are working for me. She just wouldn't get it. She wouldn't get it. She wouldn't get it, but somehow I think she must know, and she's up around in the spirit realm saying, Lord have mercy, I didn't see it. But I now know that having that belief system, that something greater than me was in charge of my destiny, of my fate, that it wasn't just me alone having to survive for myself, is the thing, is the value, is the rock that has sustained me. So my vision, my perception, my understanding of what it means to be a universal citizen has grown as I came to understand Acts 1728, my favorite Bible verse that says, in God I move and breathe and have my being. So my every attempt in life has been, since I was a little girl, to be in that space that I call God. To literally live in the breath that is God. To live in the breath and allow the breath to breathe me as God. And that is the reason I see I have been able to manage fame, handle the success, grow in grace, grow in the wisdom and glory that is offered by that space that I know to be God. Because in God I live and breathe. I move and breathe. And I have my being. And everything that I do and all that I am comes up and out from the center of that space. Even when I didn't know what to call it. So I have paid attention to my life because I understand that my life, just like your life, is always speaking to you. Where you are. In the language, with the people, with the circumstances and experiences that you can understand and interpret if you are willing to see that always life, God, is speaking to you. Now it took me a while to actually really get this and to understand it. But once I did, I started paying attention to everything. And one of the reasons why I can now accept the fact that I can offer my gatherings of information and wisdom and call myself a spiritual teacher is that every single person who ever came on my show, and I hear there's like 37,000 guests I've talked to. A lot of them came from dysfunction and a lot of them wouldn't appear to be teachers. But every one of them had something to say that was meaningful and valuable and that I could use to grow myself into the best of myself. Which is what all of our jobs are. Your number one job is to become more of yourself. And to grow yourself into the best of yourself. One of my greatest teachers was a man named John Diaz. We were doing a show called Would You Survive? And on Tuesday, October 31st in 2000, Singapore Airlines flight 006, a Boeing 747 from Taipei to Los Angeles took off with a 179 souls aboard. Four crew and 79 passengers perished in that flight. A total of 83 fatalities. There was a typhoon rolling through at the time and the plane went down the wrong runway. Now what's interesting, John Diaz was on that plane and he had had several several several indications, which I'll talk about later, whispers that he shouldn't have gotten on the plane. But he did anyway. He got on the plane and he managed to be one of the survivors. And on the Oprah show I was asking him, do you think it was, what do you think it was that you were this one of the survivors? And I said, do you think it was your position on the plane? Because he was in first class and he was sitting on the right next to an exit door. And he said, yes, I think it might have been the position of the plane. And also my quick thinking, he says. And the fact that I didn't stop moving. So I said, you don't believe you're not a religious man? You don't believe that there was some kind of divine intervention going on there? He goes, no, I'm not a religious person. I don't believe is any, I do not believe that it was anything divine. I don't believe that. I did see, he said, as I got knocked back into the plane, that it looked like Dante's Inferno. With people strapped into their seats and just burning. And it seemed a bit to me as I turned and looked backwards, like there was a light coming out of the tops of their heads. I guess you could call it an aura was leaving their bodies. And some lights were brighter than others. It changed, he said, it changed me. It gave me a new kind of spirituality in a sense that I now believe somehow, I don't know how, but life continues on somehow through that light. And I thought, you know, I'm not a religious man, but I thought the brightness and dimness of the auras were how one lives one's life, so to speak. So that's one of the major things that really has changed with me since then, he says. I want to live my life so my aura, when it leaves, is one of the brightest ones. That's one of those moments that happens and you know that it's bigger than a show about survivors. Because I always knew that when I am moved, at least a million other people might be too. Because if I can feel it, and there are 20 million people watching around the world, it means that somebody else also felt and heard the same thing. That's what connection is. So I thought a lot about that and thought about it obviously in thinking about, in preparing to talk to you all today, about how does one lead a meaningful life? Because ultimately isn't that what we all want? We want to lead a life so that however we transition, people can say, wow, that was a bright one. That was a bright light. First of all, I think that it comes from a deep sense of awareness about who you are and why you're here. It comes from being in touch with on a regular basis, the appreciation and the holy gratitude that should fill each of our hearts on a regular basis, just knowing what a privilege it is to be here and to be human. Close your eyes for a moment, will you please? And breathe with me. Just close your eyes and if you will, put your thumb to your middle finger and gather your other fingers around and let's feel the vibration and pulse of your personal energy as you take three deep breaths with me. Inhale and as you exhale just feel the vibration, energy, blood pulsating through your body, through you. And another inhale and another inhale and keep your eyes closed and let's just think about this day. This day that you have been graced to breathe in and out thousands of times. This day where many of those breaths were taken for granted, you just expected the next one to come, but the truth is there is no guarantee that the next one comes. This day, how you started your day, what your thoughts were this morning, how you've carried yourself through this day, how you've been allowed to have encounters and experiences, some challenging, some more life-enhancing, that pushed you forward another day of being here on the planet Earth as a human being. Just think about that. After all you've been through in this day alone and the many days and years past, how you got here to this prestigious, esteemed university, the choices you made that have brought you to this day. Open your heart and quietly to yourself, say the only prayer that's ever needed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're still here and you get another chance this day to do better and be better. Another chance to become more of who you were created and what you were created to fulfill. Thank you. Open your eyes. That's how it starts. That is the foundation for meaning and purpose in your life, is to bring yourself back to your breath.