You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:00)
This episode of the Oprah Podcast is presented by our fantastic partners at The Farmer's Dog. We saw a TikTok with 17 million views of a young woman who was crashing out.

**Daley** (0:15)
Want me to be honest? I'm angry.

**Daley** (0:18)
I'm mad. I'm mad because I care more about you than you care about me. And no matter how much I try to let go of it and give it to God, it's still so heavy.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:33)
Wow. You were having a day.

**Simone** (0:34)
I was.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:35)
You were having a day.

**Simone** (0:35)
I was.

**Shawn Achor** (0:36)
Beliefs are more powerful than I think we give them credit for. You wrote a whole book. Yes.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:40)
You give them a lot of credit.

**Shawn Achor** (0:43)
I'm a big fan of beliefs.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:43)
You're actually giving them a lot of credit.

**Shawn Achor** (0:45)
There's lots of definitions of belief. Mine is just a simple one. It's the lens to which you view the world.

**Daley** (0:50)
What advice do you have to this generation of people who are dating, who have no belief that finding true love is real?

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:57)
That question is going to him, not to me. I know this for sure. You do not become what you wish for. You do not become what you want. You do not become even what you aspire to. You become exactly what you believe is possible.
Okay. So Forbes was doing a list on 250 of the greatest self-made people in the country. And guess who's number one?
Now, I usually don't-honest to goodness, I usually don't care about these things, because a person just sent me-another person who's on the list, who sent me the list, and they said, oh, I'm so happy to be on this list with you. And I said, what list is it? Oh, it's The Forms list. Now, what's great about this list, it's about the people who are the self-made people in the country, and also one of the way they measured it is the distance that you've come from where you were to where you are. And this makes me want to cry because it's in such a long way from Cosiesco, dirt road, Mississippi to here.
It's like it's another planet, born to a teen mother, poverty, Mississippi, racism, misogynism, sexism, all of that stuff. But I will tell you this, that's why this show is so important. It never occurred to me in all the successes that I've had, that I wouldn't be successful. Never occurred to me that I wouldn't be successful. And the reason it never occurred to me is because of what we're talking about today, your beliefs. Because from the time I was that little girl in rural Mississippi on my grandmother's back porch, screen porch, and her, y'all who know me know you've heard this story. She was hanging out the clothes on the line because she was a domestic worker and would bring the sheets home to boil them in the big black pot because we didn't have washing machines. And she would, was boiling the sheets in the pot and taking them out and putting them on the line. And she said, Oprah Gale, you better watch me because one day you're going to have to do this for yourself. And I could feel inside myself that the Forbes List was coming.
It would take seven years.
No. Of course, I didn't know one darn thing about a Forbes List, but I could feel inside myself that I am not going to be in clothes on a line and boiling them in a pot because I believed that this is the belief that has carried me my whole life. I believed that I was God's child because I would sit in the service every Sunday and I would listen to the preacher say, you're God's child. And because I didn't have a father, didn't know who my father was at the time, I didn't know my father until I was seven, eight years old, I thought that God was actually my father. And therefore, Jesus was my brother.
And that we were just all in the family together. And that through God, all things are possible. So I actually believed that. So in every endeavor, every contest I was in, every speaking engagement, when I moved to Baltimore, when I got the job there, when I got my first job at 16, when I moved to Chicago, and everybody said, Chicago is the most racist place you can ever go for a job, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get the job because I was a woman or because of the color of my skin. I thought if I don't get the job, it's because they don't like me. It's because I'm not funny enough, I'm not warm enough, I'm not good enough. But it never occurred to me because why? I'm God's child. That is a core belief that I have had that has carried me everywhere. I wanted to know, what are your core beliefs? Because I know this for sure. You do not become what you wish for. You do not become what you want. You do not become even what you aspire to. You become exactly what you believe is possible. And those beliefs carry you forward. You make all your decisions based upon what do you really believe. And so if you're not getting where you want to go, you have to look at what is the ceiling of my beliefs. OK, so who wants to answer that? What do you believe? What do you believe? Yes. Yeah.