"Winfrey worked through her despondence by working harder."
When Oprah Winfrey decided to get into television and films, after her success in "The Color Purple," she was faced with a huge commercial failure her first time out with Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. That's the context of her working harder to get through her discouragement.
What happened was Oprah bought the film and television rights to several books, with one being "Beloved," by Toni Morrison. When the film was released in 1998, it was a huge bomb, and only gained back about half of what it cost to produce. Winfrey also palyed one of the parts in the story.
The very public failure discouraged Winfrey, even though she had succeeded in other projects.
To me her response to working harder in response to this failure, was a good one. There's nothing like digging yourself into another project you have to focus on, to get you out of the discouragement that thinking on the past can bring.
Having said that, I think we do have to be careful on how long we take this step. To work harder to get yourself out of a emotional hole is one thing, to end up burning yourself out doing it is another.
This isn't that hard to measure as to its healthiness for us. Just look at how you feel after some time of working hard on a new project. Once the depression or emotion eases up within us, we can than ease up some on our response of working harder than before.
The whole idea is to get ourselves focused on something new, not to burn ourselves out attempting to make up for a past failure.
Everyone fails sometime in their lives, and many times it can be very public. One thing to keep in mind, is even though the majority of the public tends to forget it after a very short time, we can hold onto it far longer than others. We can think everyone out there is focusing on our failure, when the truth is they've gone on to something else to center their attention on.
We just need to get ourselves out of keeping that failure in our minds, and working hard on a project is a good, temporary way to do it. Forcing ourselves to focus on something else gradually gets us out of our funk, and into being creative and looking forward to our next success.
Other Oprah Resources:
Oprah Winfrey - About.com Readers' Most Admired Entrepreneur
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Oprah's 4 interviews with Jill Bolte Taylor were the first that Oprah did after Eckhart Tolle and they take everything Tolle talks about to another level. Oprah's copy of Jill's book, MY STROKE OF INSIGHT, was dog-eared and all marked up and kept reading from it the way she read from A New Earth and recommended it highly.
Oprah's recommendation was enough for me. I read My Stroke of Insight and I loved it too. This story is as inspiring as The Last Lecture or Tuesdays with Morrie - and even better, it has a Happy Ending!
I bought the book on Amazon because they have it for 40% off retail and they also had an amazing interview with Dr Taylor that I haven't seen anywhere else - Here is the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/My-Stroke-Insight-Scientists-Personal/dp/0670020745/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211471755&sr=1-2
Posted by: Ann | June 3, 2008 3:10 AM | Permalink to Comment