selflessness vs selfishness , and failure - Oprah Winfrey

This is an interview led by student from Stanford Graduate School of Business posted 28th April 2014 on youtube. I can't think of how she made it today becoming such a inspiring woman inside out.

I love the whole talk and if you can't stand the whole hour listening, you can go straight to 1:00:46 for the closing note form Oprah. I take some notes too if your device fail to play the video. Enjoy!

Q = how do you think about balancing selflessness with selfishness?

It's kind of the tension between putting yourself first and also taking care of others

Oprah = everybody's heard the whole oxygen mask thing.

The truth is, you don't have anything to give that you don't have.

So you have to keep your own self full. that's your job.

real work is to figure out where your power

base is and to work on the alignment of your

personality, your gifts that you have to

give with the real reason why you're here.

That's the number one thing you have to do, is to work

on yourself and to fill yourself up and keep your cup full.

Keep yourself full. I used to be afraid of that.

I used to be afraid, particularly, from people who'd say, od, she's so full of herself.

And now, I embrace it.

I consider it a compliment that I am full of myself because only when you're full.

I'm full, I'm overflowing. my cup runneth over. I have so much.

I have so much to offer and so much to give and I'm not afraid of honouring myself.

The design, the reason why I'm here is much bigger.

So the ability to take care of that, to honor that, to honor yourself and that

which is greater than yourself, that which was the reason for your being here.

There's no selflessness in that.

Only through that do you have the ability to offer yourself, your whole

self, your full expression of who you are, to the rest of the world.

put yourself at the top of the list. Future yourself, honour yourself.

Stop the crazy mind chatter in your head that tells you all the time that

you're not good enough because that's the number one issue with everybody.

The reason people say, you know, how is that?

It's cuz you wanna know how do you measure up.

Well, to know that your just being here, your just being here.

however that sperm, bam, hit that egg, however that occurred for you

that your being here is such a miraculous thing and

that your real job is to honor that, is to honor that.

Oprah's note = 

I just wanna end with this: there are no mistakes.

There really aren't any, cuz you have a supreme destiny.

When you're in your little mind, in

your little personality mind or you're not centered,

you really don't know who you are but you come from something greater and bigger.

We really all are the same.

You don't know that, you get all flustered, you get

stressed all the time, wanting something to be what it isn't.

There's a supreme moment of destiny calling on your life.

Your job is to feel that, to hear that, to know that

and sometimes, when you're not listening, you get taken off track.

You get in the wrong marriage, the wrong relationship, you take the wrong job.

Yeah, but it's all leading to the same path.

There are no wrong paths. There are none.

There's no such thing as failure really, because failure is

just that thing, trying to move you in another direction.

So you get as much from your losses, as you do from

your victory cuz the losses are there to wake you up.

So when you understand that you don't allow yourself to be completely thrown

by a grade or by a circumstance because your life is bigger than

any one experience and if I had, I always ask people on Super

Soul Sunday to tell me, what would you say to your younger self?

Every person says in one form or another, I would have said, relax.

It's gonna be okay. It really is gonna be okay because even if you're on

a detour right now and that's how you know, when you're

not at ease with yourself, when you're feeling like dead

is the cue that you need to be moving in another direction.

Don't let yourself get all thrown off, continue to be thrown off course.

When you're feeling off course, that's the key.

How do I turn around?

So when everybody was talking about, when I started this network,

if I had only known, good lord, how difficult it would be.

The way through the challenge is to get still

and ask yourself what is the next right move?

Not think about oh*devastation*, what is

the next right move and then from that space make the next

right move and the next right move and not to be overwhelmed by

it because you know your life is bigger than that one moment.

You know you're not defined by what somebody

says is a failure for you because failure is

just there to point you in a different direction.

Thank you.