Thread by @mar15sa

The best quotes from the @Oprah interview in 'How to Lead' by David M. Rubenstein:

"Your legacy is every life that you've touched. We like to think that these great, philanthropic moments are the ones that leave the impact... but it's really what you do every day."

"Every now and then, somebody will say, 'Do you miss the show?' I don't miss the show. What I miss is the people, the camaraderie. What I did every day was have my own aftershow with the audience. I would talk to the audience... 30-40 minutes after every show...

It was my personal focus group. It's the reason why we were number one for twenty-five years."

"I realized a couple of years in that you run your own race better than anybody. If you take the time to see what everybody else is doing, you lose your ground. I could be a better me than I could be anybody else. No need to try to compare myself to other people...

Once I got that, we hit our own rhythm. I discovered that it wasn't just a show. but that it was a platform on which to speak to the world. That was about 1989 when I thought, 'Okay, what do you want to say to the world? How do you want to be used and not have the TV use you?'"

"The thing that worked for me all these years - whether it was the magazine, which I still have, or whether it was the show - is that I understood there's a common denominator in the human experience. I want the same thing you want... What we all want is to be able to...

live out the truest, highest expression of ourselves as a human being. That doesn't end until you take your last breath. What is the truest, highest vision that you hold for yourself? No matter where you are in your life... there's always a next level, to the last breath."

"I know that when you change a girl's life, you not only change hers, you change her entire community, because girls give back to the family, give back to the community."

"This is what I now know with age and perspective - that many times, getting demoted or getting fired is an opportunity for something else to show up. Lots of people I've interviewed over the years have these stories about it being the best thing that ever happened."

"I think everybody knows I've moved my whole life on instinct. When I've grown as much as I can grow in a space, that's my instinct to move."

"I never thought [my skill as an interviewer] was better than anybody else's. What I do think I have that is really uniquely my own is my ability to connect to the audience. My skill comes not from my interviewing ability. My skill comes from my listening ability. And my skill...

comes from me knowing fundamentally inside myself that I am no different than the audience. What gave me the power in the seat and the power with the microphone was I always saw myself as the surrogate for the audience. I would ask people questions that I would not normally ask."

"I've always been the kind of person that, if I find something that's interesting or sharable, I want everybody to have it."

"That show was like therapy for me. Every day of the show I paid attention. I've never been to a therapist. But I paid attention all those days on the show. And I made therapy acceptable for a lot of people who thought, 'Not me, no.'"

"One of the things I started to get in the mid to late '90s was that everybody I had on the show would say something to me like, 'Was that okay? How was that?' at the end of the interview. I started to track it...

I was interviewing a father who was in jail for life for murdering his twin daughters. At the end of the interview, even behind bars, he said to me, 'Was that okay? How'd I do?'

Barack Obama said it when he sat in the chair the first time. George Bush said it...

Beyoncé said it. She taught me how to twerk and then said, 'Is that okay?'... But this is what I learned sitting in that chair for 25 years...

At the end of the day, whether you are interviewing me or I get to interview you, whatever your profession is, wherever you are in your life, in your relationships, every person that you encounter, after every experience, wants to know, 'Was that okay?'...

People are really saying is, 'Did you hear me? And did what I say mean anything to you?' I started to listen with that in mind, with that intention of validating that your being here, your speaking to me, your taking the time to do this with me is important because you matter...

That's true for everybody who's watching or listening, that every argument that you ever have, every encounter, the person just wants to know, 'Did you hear me? Did you see me? And did I say anything that mattered?'"

"I'm going to continue developing shows that speak to the humanity of people in a way that makes them want to live better and do better and that exalts their victories and lets them know they are important and meaningful in the world."

You might also like this quote thread for @richardbranson:

https://twitter.com/mar15sa/status/1308061549202993153?s=20