When Oprah Winfrey gives career advice, she gets me to listen. As a master orator, the media executi
WhenOprah Winfrey gives career advice, she gets me to listen. As a master orator, the media executive, former daytime talk show host and self-made billionaire makes a living out of finding divine meaning in mundane questions, like the difference between a job and a calling, or what you would tell your younger self.
For me personally, though, what has encouraged me through a layoff, career disappointment and unreasonable managers is her advice on how to handle challenging career losses that feel overwhelming.
One grim winter, when I was unemployed after a layoff and worried I was unemployable, I encountered a YouTube clip from Winfrey’s 2014 lecture to Stanford Graduate School of Business students, in which she shared the one piece of career advice she wanted to leave with them.
As soon as I watched it, I was transfixed by her ability to make the career story of failure I had been telling myself into a much bigger story about life:
“There is 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, but it’s all leading to the same path. There are no wrong paths. There are none. There is 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 victories, because the losses are there to wake you up.”
Her speech gave me the permission I needed to put those hard months into wider perspective. Yes, a layoff was a job loss, but it was not a failure in Winfrey’s eyes ― and shouldn’t be in mine, either. Winfrey said that when you understand that losses are there to wake you up, “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.”
