Oprah Winfrey: Why Entrepreneurs Should Put EVERYTHING Into Self-Improvement!

Good morning, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the major problems of the world. So today's message is work on yourself. Over to you, Oprah Winfrey. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning.

I say to my girls all of the time that your real work is to figure out where your power base is and to work on the alignment of your personality, your gifts that you have to give, with the real reason why you're here. That's, that's the number one thing you have to do, is to work on yourself and to fill yourself up. And keep your cup full. Keep yourself full. Now I used to be afraid of that. I used to be afraid, particularly from people who say, oh, she's so full of herself. She's so full of herself. And now I embrace it. I consider it a compliment that I am full of myself. Because only when you're full, I'm full, I'm overflowing, my cup runneth over. I have so much, I have so much to offer and so much to give. And I am not afraid of honoring myself. It's miraculous when you think about it.

I really love how Oprah Winfrey turned what was intended as a negative of being full of yourself, and she turns that into a positive. And I think it's such a necessary skill as entrepreneurs to take negative things and find the positivity in it, to find the optimism in it, to find the solutions in it, cuz that's how we stand out and succeed. I also really agree with the point on developing and working on yourself, and this is where it can get really hard. It's easy to say I'm going to work on myself. It's easy to say I'm going to work on improving this new skill or learning that new language or building that new business or whatever it is that you want to go out and do. It's easy to say, but it's hard to execute. It's hard to execute because chances are you're the only one in your environment that actually cares about it. Like, say you want to be a YouTuber. You look at all these YouTubers, say, I want to be a YouTuber, I want to be I want to build a business on YouTube. I want to have an impact. I have a message that needs to come out. I want to get my YouTube channel started. Chances are you're the only person that you know who wants to do YouTube. And so it can be hard to stay motivated because the people around you, some of them may be negative, some of them may tell you, "You can't do that. You've never gone to school for that. What makes you think you can create a YouTube channel? Are you kidding me? Do you know who you are?" That's great, some people may be negative. Some people though may just not care, and some people may be encouraging, but no matter how encouraging they are, you are the one who cares the most about this dream. And when you don't have the people around you who are also doing the same thing, especially at a higher level than you are, it can be really hard to continue and stay motivated. What happens then is you have a day when you're motivated, you're off, you're working hard, you're creating your channel, you want to make a new video, and then you wake up the next day The momentum is gone, you say, "Who am I to make a video? I'm not very good. Did you see what I did yesterday? That was terrible." And then you get inspired by something else. Maybe you watch a video and then you're on fire again, like, "I'm gonna make another video," and you go off and you create it, and then you fall off. And so it's this constant up and down, yin roller coaster, yo-yo, you know, up and down, never really getting any consistency in it. And so the key for me, when there's something that you really want to work on that nobody else in your environment cares about, is putting it into your calendar and scheduling it out. If your goal is to have success on YouTube, as an example, or insert whatever your goal is, then schedule it out. Make time for it every single day that you're spending time building your skills, learning the language of that industry to get better at it, honing your craft. Because on the days where you're on fire, motivated, you won't need the schedule. You just be— you'll blast through it and just have tons of productivity, but on the off days, on the days in between those spikes, the schedule helps you stay committed to the goal that you have. The schedule helps you stay on path even when you don't have as strong a motivation to do the work. And so I would look at what are your big goals, what is it that you want to accomplish, how do you want to work on yourself, and then look at your calendar and do the things in your calendar map to your ambition? Are you doing the work in your daily calendar that will help you achieve your goals? Because for too many people, it's not. Too many people have these big goals, and then you look at how they're spending their time, they don't match up. The work they're doing consistently is not going to help get them to where they want to go. And so those days of inspiration are amazing, but if you want to continue the process and actually make real progress towards achieving your goals and really building yourself up, then you have to schedule it in and make time for it to happen. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is the daily non-negotiable for you? What do you schedule into your calendar every day, at least during the week, weekdays, that has to happen every day, non-negotiable? I'm curious to find out. Leave it down in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to Margarita from lovesome.com. Thank you so much, Margarita, for picking up a copy of my book, Year One Word. I really, really appreciate the support, and I hope you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of Ennspresso. I wake up every morning, Ennspresso keep me going.

I spoke at an education summit for Microsoft. I also spoke at an education summit for Apple. At the Education Summit for Microsoft, I would say that 70% of the executives spent about 70% of their presentations talking about how to beat Apple. At the Apple Education Summit, 100% of the executives spent 100% of their presentations talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn. One is playing this way. And one is playing that way. One is playing finite and the other one is playing infinite. Guess which one gets frustrated? So at the end of my talk at Microsoft, they gave me a gift. They gave me the new Zune when it was a thing. And let me tell you, this thing was spectacular. It was the most elegant piece of technology I'd ever used. The user interface was incredible. The design was spectacular. Spectacular. I absolutely loved it. It was easy to use and it was bright and gorgeous and fantastic. It didn't work on iTunes, which is a different problem, so I couldn't use it, but it was amazing. And elegant. My God, it was elegant. So I'm sitting in the back of a taxi with a very senior Apple executive, sort of employee number 12 kind of guy. And, you know, I like to stir pots, so I turned to him and I said, you know, "Microsoft gave me their new Zune and it is so much better than your iPod Touch." And he turned to me and he said, "I have no doubt." Conversation over. Because the Infinite Player understands sometimes you're ahead and sometimes you're behind. Sometimes your product is better and sometimes it's worse. The goal isn't to be the best every day. The goal isn't to outdo your competition every day. That's a finite construction. If I had said to Microsoft, I've got the new iPod Touch and it's so much better than your Zune, they would have said, can we see it? What does it do? React, react, react, react. Finite players play to beat the people around them. Infinite players play to be better than themselves. To wake up every single day and say, "How can we make our company a better version of itself today than it was yesterday? How can we create a product this week that's better than the product we created last week?" We also have to play the infinite game. It's not about being ranked number one. It's not about having more followers on Twitter than your friends. It's not about outdoing anyone. It's about how to outdo yourself. It's not about selling more books or getting more TED views than somebody else. It's about how to make sure that the work that you're producing is better than the work you produced before. You are your competition, and that is what ensures you stay in the game the longest, and that is what ensures you find joy, because the joy comes not from comparison but from advancement.

The concept of improving lives runs through the center of everything I do, and then I realize that the way to improve lives is to continually improve yourself, right? So with that, every morning when I get out of the bed, you know, I haven't fixed everything in the world yet, so there's always something to do. And in this film, I read an interesting quote from the Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. He said, that good people have to get out of the bed every day and try to empty the ocean with a ladle, right? And I thought that was, you know, I knew that was profound and I paused for a second and I said, all right, what the hell is a ladle, right?

Right?

So then, you know, I just, I touched it on my iPad, it's ladle. Oh, it's like a big spoon, a big spoon, okay. It's like a soup spoon. Yeah, it's like a soup spoon. I was like, why you use soup spoon? Trying to empty the ocean with a soup spoon, you know, as the mentality of how you wake up every day to try to do good in the world. So for me, I'm really driven by continually trying to elevate my mind and elevate my spirit and care for my body and to be able to love as many people as effectively as possible with this mystery