One of The Most Eye Opening Speeches Ever | Oprah Winfrey

it was very difficult for me to figure out where my boundaries were because i'd grown up poor and didn't have anything so it's easy when you don't have anything and people ask you for money they say i need 500 you say i don't have it because i'm just trying to get my rent paid it's harder when your multi-billion dollar salary is now in the paper and you get a lot of friends and cousins you didn't have before so how do you set boundaries for yourself i was having trouble setting boundaries myself for myself for even strangers people would just show up at my door in chicago and say oh bro i left my husband please help me and i would because she knows i haven't so what i learned was is that oh the reason why people keep showing up is because my intention is to make them think that i'm such a nice person that you can ask me for anything you can get me to do anything i'm gonna say yes i'm gonna say yes so when stevie called me this time i thought i'd try out my first no on stevie let's start big he wanted me to donate some money to a charity and i didn't want to donate to the charity because i have my own charities and i care about a lot of people but the the problem is when you you have money everybody thinks you just want to give to everything so every letter i ever get starts with we know you love the children yes i do love the children but somebody else is going to have to help the children so i said to stevie uh i said to stevie no and um as a person who has that disease to please i was waiting for him then just to say i will never speak to you again i will never call you i will never sing a song for you and he didn't he just said okay okay okay it's okay he said okay check you later and what i learned from that is many times you will have angst and worry about things and put yourself in a state when the other person really isn't even thinking about you so learning that i could specifically determine for myself what the boundaries were for me what i wanted to do give my money give my time give of my service to who i wanted to give it to when i did that i get to make that decision and just because you get a hundred requests a week doesn't mean you have to try to fulfill all of that just because you have all of these demands on your time and on you doesn't mean that you have to say yes you get to decide because you're the master of your fate the captain of your soul as william ernest henley said in invictus and understanding that really changed the meaning of my life in that i was not no longer driven by what other people wanted me to do but took charge of my own destiny making choices based upon what do i feel is the next right move for me quincy jones discovered me and it's so interesting to me because when i was uh working as a television news woman in baltimore and really all i wanted to do was be in actors but i was doing television and i felt at the time like i can't quit this job because this is what everybody else wants to do and if i quit this job what am i going to do um and i was going to a speech coach at the time that the station had sent me to they you know they have the broadcasting school they sent everybody the same woman and i was telling her you know i really don't want to do this what i really want to do is act and she says my dear you don't want to act because if you wanted to act you'd be doing it what you want to be my dear is a star because if you wanted to act you'd be waiting tables in new york you'd be and i thought now why am i going to wait tables if i'm already working in tv so i said well what i think is going to happen is i will be discovered because i want it so badly somebody's going to have to discover me and she said you just dream you dream you're a dreamer so when it happened i called her up i said you will not believe this i got discovered and it really was a discovery it's like one of those lana turner stories only um wasn't a drugstore he was uh in his hotel room saw me on tv it was unbelievable the interesting thing about that is that i i truly believe that thoughts are the greatest vehicle to change power and success in the world everything begins with thoughts i mean the chairs that we're sitting in the room that we're in all started because somebody thought it so i thought up the color purple for myself i know this is going to sound strange to you i read the book i got so many copies of that book i passed the book around everybody i knew if i was on the bus i'd pass it out to people and when i heard that there was going to be a movie i started i started talking it up for myself i didn't know quincy jones or steven spielberg or how on earth i would get in this movie i'd never acted in my life but i i felt it so intensely that i had to be a part of that movie i just i i really do believe i created it for myself i wanted it more than anything in the world and would have done anything to do it anything to do it turn your wounds into wisdom you will be wounded many times in your life you'll make mistakes some people will call them failures but i have learned that failure is really god's way of saying excuse me you're moving in the wrong direction it's just an experience [Music] just an experience i remember being taken off the air in baltimore being told that i was no longer be being fit for television and that i could not anchor the news because i used to go out on the stories and my own truth was even though i'm not a weeper i would cry for the people in the stories and uh which really wasn't very effective as a news reporter to be covering a fire and uh crying because the people lost their house and it wasn't until they i was demoted as a on-air anchor woman and thrown into the talk show arena to get rid of me that i allowed my own truth to come through and the first day i was on the air doing my first talk show back in 1978 it felt like breathing which is what your true passion should feel like it should be so natural to you and so i took what had been a mistake what had been perceived as a failure with my career as an anchor woman in the news business and turned it into a talk show career that's done okay for me what drives you to keep working so hard you could you know you and i are in the 60s category and so when you're in your 60s you know you've lived more than you're going to live yeah realistically so when you realize you've lived more than you're going to live you can say why not relax a little bit why not just ease up why have you decided to even work harder than you did before because i think david that everybody you know the thing that works for me all these years whether it was the magazine or which i still have or whether it was the show i could i understood that there's a common denominator in the human experience and i want the same thing you want which is the same thing you want and you want what we all want is to be able to live out the truest highest expression of ourselves as a human being that 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