4 of Oprah's Secrets to Success and Happiness
Oprah Winfrey's speech at the Golden Globes thrilled and fortified her audience, both in the room and around the world. It contained impassioned observations about girls seeing a black woman receive the Cecil B. DeMille award for the first time, a powerful statement of support for the press, and a moving tribute to Recy Taylor, who passed away in late 2017.
"When they first called me and said they wanted me to accept this, I said I shouldn’t be the person who gets this award," she told the press afterwards. "When it comes to films, I am the new kid on the block. I always feel like when I’m acting, I am out of my box. It’s the most intimidated I ever feel." But Winfrey went on to learn that the award encompassed a person's achievement in entertainment more broadly: "What I was able to do with The Oprah Show, and the cultural statement we were able to make throughout the world - I feel very proud of that."
The TV superstar went on to share four of the biggest lessons she's learned throughout her storied career. Here are Winfrey's heartfelt, hard-earned suggestions for wisdom, happiness, and success.
Believe people when they say who they are.
"The greatest lesson I’ve learned throughout my career came from Maya Angelou, actually... After I’d known her for a while, she said, 'Babe, you need to know, when people show you who you are, believe them the first time. Your problem is it takes you 29 times to see the same lesson coming in a different skirt, wearing a different pair of pants.' I think that has been one of my greatest wisdom teachings: to assess from people’s behavior, their actions. Not just towards me, but towards other people - who they are and how they behave, because if people talk about other people, they’ll talk about you. I think in business and in personal relationships, that’s also been my greatest lesson. Staying grounded has been really great for me."
The key to fulfillment, success, and happiness? Do work that comes from your soul.
"The way to make movies is to do stuff you love. You know, for 25 years I worked on The Oprah Show.... I came home and sometimes it was hard to even take off my clothes, because I knew I was going to be getting up four hours later.... I felt exhausted, but not depleted. Do the work that comes from the soul of you. From your background, from stories that you’ve grown up with, from stories that bring you passion - from stories you don’t just yearn to tell, but stories that, if you don’t tell them, won’t get told."
"The single greatest wisdom I think I’ve ever received is that the key to fulfillment, success, happiness, contentment in life is when you align your personality with what your soul actually came to do. I believe everyone has a soul and their own personal spiritual energy. When you use your personality to serve whatever that thing is, you can’t help but be successful. So if you do films that come from the interior of your soul, you cannot miss.... All the great, wonderful experiences of my life that brought me to this moment have come from working from the interior of myself. That’s why I feel so authentic. When you do that, you’ll win."
The greatest gift you can give someone is to see and hear them.
"At seven, I was so sad...all my real love came from my teachers. I would say this to anyone in this room: You have no idea, the power of noticing another human being and what it feels like when someone knows they have been seen. It is the greatest gift you can give. All those years of doing The Oprah Show, the greatest lesson I learned - after every show someone would say, ‘How was that?’ They would all say the same thing, and so I started to see that there’s this common thread in our humanity. Everybody wants to know, ‘How was that? Did I do okay? Did you hear me? And did what I say mean something to you?’ I would say, recognizing that has helped me to become a person of compassion. I know that if the core of you is the same as the core of me, you just want to be heard."
For every negative action, a positive reaction is possible.
"I always think and know, having watched it over the years, [over] thousands and thousands of interviews, watching people with their dysfunction - when something really negative is brewing, there is the direct opposite reaction that is also possible, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When something as big as what started to happen in October with Harvey Weinstein started to unfold...with every day's revelation I thought, here is an opportunity for powerful growth. How do we use this moment to elevate what is happening instead of continually victimize ourselves?
I think that wearing black in solidarity is one step. I think that what Time's Up is doing with the legal defense fund is a major step. It was very important to all of us involved with Time's Up that it not just be about the women of Hollywood, because we’re already a privileged group. But to extend to the women of the world, because as I said tonight, there isn’t a culture, a race, a religion, a politic, a workplace that hasn’t been affected by it. And one of the reasons I why wanted to tell Recy Taylor's story is to let people know it's been happening for a very long time, when people didn't feel like they could speak up. There’s so many women who have endured so much and remained silent and kept going because there was no other recourse. And now that we have all joined as one voice, it feels like empowerment to those women who never had it."
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