The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(23)

OPRAH: And if you believe that, and buy into that, then that’s exactly what you will create.

LYNNE: Exactly. It gives people permission to accumulate way more than they need out of the fear that they’re not going to have enough. So even massive accumulation often comes from the fear I’m not going to have enough for me.





SARAH BAN BREATHNACH


SARAH BAN BREATHNACH: Simple Abundance was number one for almost a year. It was on the best-seller list for 119 weeks. And I’ve never shared this before because you don’t get much sympathy for this part of the story; the Wednesday that there was no call from the publisher, I thought, Oh, that’s sort of strange. No one called. So I called my agent and I said, “I haven’t heard anything.” She said, “Well, you’re not on the best-seller list this week.”

OPRAH: How was that after 119 weeks?

SARAH: I cried and cried. I thought no one in the world would understand what this feels like. The only trouble with being number one is eventually you have to be number two, three, and four.

OPRAH: Because life moves on.

SARAH: It does. It does.

OPRAH: But hadn’t you prepared yourself and said, Well, what’s going to happen when that call doesn’t come?

SARAH: I didn’t. That’s one of the lessons I wish I had realized. I wish I had learned that success goes in cycles.

OPRAH: But this is the thing, Sarah. This is the thing. What I feel strongly is that not only is it cyclical, but you’ve also got to understand that when you’re in the midst of a phenomenon, you weren’t looking for a hit.

SARAH: Right. I wasn’t looking for a best-selling book.

OPRAH: You were looking for a way to speak to the hearts of women. That’s what you were looking to do. Am I correct?

SARAH: I was. You know, the only woman whose life I was trying to change when I was writing Simple Abundance was my own. And then the miracle was that it was just touching other women’s lives.





JACK CANFIELD


I think the greatest wound we’ve all experienced is somehow being rejected for being our authentic self. And as a result of that, we then try to be what we’re not to get approval, love, protection, safety, money, whatever. And the real need for all of us is to reconnect with the essence of who we really are and reown all the disowned parts of ourselves, whether it’s our emotions, our spirituality, whatever. We all go around hiding parts of ourselves.

I was with a Buddhist teacher a number of years ago. And he said, “Let me give you the secret. If you were to meditate for twenty years, this is where you’d finally get to: Just be yourself. But be all of you.”





GOLDIE HAWN


It’s a great thing to be recognized for something that you’ve done. But it’s a moment in time. You can’t live off of those accolades and make them the sum total of your importance in life, or your purpose in life. You can’t let them define who you are. Those awards, they’re wonderful. But they’re never going to define you. I define myself by my ability to give. I define myself by my ability to understand. I define myself by my ethics and by my truth. These are the things that inform who I am, other than exterior moments that ebb and flow.





JORDAN PEELE


OPRAH: I remember reading an article, as I was ending my show, and it was an article about Michael Jackson. His friends were commenting, saying he did Thriller and then spent the rest of his life chasing Thriller. And even though he sold twenty million albums from Bad, or forty million, whatever the number was, he was comparing everything in his life, still, to the end, to Thriller. So how do you now avoid the trap because Get Out, your first film, first directing, first written, has become this phenomenon?

JORDAN PEELE: You know, I will continue to make movies—the movies that I want to see. If I want to see it, I have to have trust that other people will. And if they don’t, I have to accept that’s what it is. But for me, the biggest reward of all of this has always been the fact that I get to make another movie.





JIMMY KIMMEL


I’ve been at a major crossroads on a number of occasions. I was working at a radio station in Los Angeles and was making a decent amount of money. Then I was offered a lot more money by another radio station to compete against the guys that I worked with. I went to my boss and said, “Hey, listen, I’m being offered all this money to go against you guys.” And he said, “Well, we can’t pay you that much money.” I thought about it. And I decided that even though it was a life-changing amount of money for me, I would not do it. I would just not feel right about competing against people that I liked, who were my friends and teammates. It wasn’t three months later that I got a TV show.





JEFF WEINER


Failure is what is going to humble you. It helps you realize how fleeting success can be—at least traditional measures of success. You realize, to some extent, how beyond your control it is. And you invest less in it in terms of the way you define yourself. Success in terms of achieving objectives, in terms of manifesting a mission, in terms of manifesting a vision, that’s all good, especially if what you do can create good in the world. But to the extent that you start to define yourself through traditional measures of success—to the extent that that’s your source of self-esteem, you are destined to be unhappy because you cannot control it.