I barely watch television and don’t have cable tv so when I feel I want to get inspired I go to YouTube and find inspirational stuff to watch. One of the people I find very inspiring is Oprah Winfrey. She always shares what she learns and is a great inspiration. I grew up watching Oprah and since her channel is a cable channel, I no longer get to watch her inspiring interviews and shows. I have to go online and browse Oprah.com and that only happens if I remember to do that.

Life Lessons from Oprah’s Stanford Interview:

• Listen and follow your instincts

  From the very beginning, Oprah listened to her instinct. All of her best decisions in life were because she was attuned to what really felt like the next right move for her. She believed that the time will come when what she needed will show up for her and when that showed up she was ready to move to the next step. Oprah’s definition of luck is “preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”

• You have to know yourself and what your true calling is.

  “You have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world.”—Oprah
  “Knowing what you don’t want to do is the best possible place to be if you don’t know what to do because knowing what you don’t want to do leads you to figure out what it is you really do want to do.”

  Honor yourself and stop the crazy chatter in your head that you are not good enough. Know that you being here is a miraculous thing and your real job is to honor that. As soon as you figure that out, you can live out your life to the fullest, truest expression of yourself as a human being.

  Take the time to know who you are and why you are here. Oprah believes that everyone has a calling. There is an innate supreme moment of destiny for everyone. You cannot fulfill it unless you have a level of self awareness. You have to be connected to your inner voice or instinct or what she calls your “emotional GPS system” that allows you to make the best decisions for yourself.

  Every decision that has profited Oprah has come from listening to her inner voice first. Every time she got into a situation where she got in trouble was because she didn’t listen to it.

• There is no such thing as failure

  There is a supreme moment of destiny calling on your life. Your job is to feel that, to hear that, to know that. Sometimes when you are not listening you are taken off track (get in the wrong marriage, wrong relationship, wrong job etc), but it’s all leading to the same path. There are no wrong paths.

  There is no such thing as failure since failure is that thing trying to move you in another direction. The losses are there to wake you up. When you understand that, it allows you to not get completely thrown off by bad things happening (like a bad circumstance, etc) because your life is bigger than any ONE experience.

  Everyone she interviewed would tell their younger self to “RELAX, it’s going to be ok.” Even if you are on a detour right now (when you are not at ease with yourself) that is the cue that you need to move into another direction. The key is to know when to turn around.

View Oprah’s Top 10 Rules for Success

1. Understand the next step that you need to take
2. Seize your opportunity
3. Everyone makes mistakes. That’s how you learn
4. Work on yourself
5. Run the race as hard as you can
6. Believe
7. We are all looking for the same thing
8. Find your purpose
9. Stay grounded
10. Relax! It’s going to be ok

It’s inspiring for me to go over these tips and to really think about it. It makes me focus on what my purpose is in life and to go for it. Did Oprah help inspire you?