10
Follow Your Personal Legend
One of the most memorable phrases of the darkly brooding Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is “Life is the train, not the station,” by which he means that life is about the journey, not the destination. Yet equally, we don’t get trains to just any old place, nor is it enough just to live—we do need to have a sense of purpose.
That’s a message Oprah Winfrey and Malala Yousafzai share. And if the two may seem an unlikely pair on the surface, they have some vital things in common: both come from very humble backgrounds, and both have become global icons for their dedication to an individual passion. Above all, both women are believers in the power of books and both are themselves inspired by certain bookish values.
Oprah was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single mother and raised in Milwaukee (a town with the dubious reputation of being the most segregated city in the United States). She has described being molested in her early teens, becoming pregnant at fourteen, and the child dying in early infancy. Yet today Winfrey is an American talk show host, actress, producer, and major philanthropist too. Of course, she is best known for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated TV chat show in history. And if you’re still not inclined to count her as a business entrepreneur, bear in mind that she was the first African American to become a multibillionaire!
While there are few people on the planet who haven’t heard of Oprah, you’d be excused for not knowing about Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani woman who, nonetheless, in 2014 became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She shares a passion for books with Oprah, and her Nobel win was in large part for her literacy campaigns. Other than that, their origins could not be more different. Yousafzai was born and brought up in the beautiful Swat valley region of Pakistan, an area of mountains, rivers, and shimmering sunsets. The serenity there was destroyed forever, however, when the Taliban seized the region in 2006, killing two thousand people. Schools became a particular target of the Taliban’s torturous agenda, with the right to education one of many freedoms lost to the women of the Swat valley. As a young girl, Malala experienced these tragedies firsthand and decided to campaign fearlessly for basic education rights for herself and girls like her.
Malala tasted her first success at the tender age of eleven while writing blogs anonymously for the BBC Urdu-language site. She wrote about how life in the valley was changing under Taliban rule and about being prevented from attending school. In her January 3, 2009, BBC blog post, under the heading “I Am Afraid,” she wrote, “I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 out of 27 pupils attended the class because the number decreased because of the Taliban’s edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.”
Inevitably, even though she never signed her name to these blog posts, over the course of the next three years, both Yousafzai and her father became known throughout Pakistan for their campaign to give Pakistani girls access to education. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and awarded the Pakistan National Youth Peace Prize.
With this fame came enemies: death threats against her were published in newspapers and slipped under her door. On the morning of October 9, 2012, Yousafzai, whose first name means “grief-stricken,” saw these threats become reality. Seated with her friends on a school bus heading home from school, she felt the bus stop and saw two Taliban soldiers come aboard. A young bearded man asked for Yousafzai by name and shot her three times in her head and shoulder, leaving her for dead.
That same day, she was given emergency treatment in a hospital in Saidu Sharif before being transferred via government helicopter to a Pakistani military hospital in Peshawar and four days later transferred again to an intensive care unit in Birmingham, England, for an emergency operation on her shattered skull.
The shooting and her incredible, indeed miraculous, recovery resulted in a global outpouring of support for Yousafzai and her family. On July 12, 2013, her sixteenth birthday, she visited New York and spoke in front of the United Nations. In October of that year, in acknowledgment of her work, the European Parliament awarded Yousafzai the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Finally, in October 2014, Malala, along with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Accepting the award, Yousafzai reaffirmed that “this award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education.”
It’s an incredible, indeed unique, story that may seem utterly different from the rise of Oprah Winfrey, but the two women share several characteristics, not least that (in their vastly different ways, of course) they both rose from obscurity to become worldwide sensations. They are also both deeply principled and both passionate advocates for books. However, behind the similarities are important psychological and political differences. As we’ll see later in this chapter, for Winfrey, a book showed her a way of understanding herself, but for Yousafzai, books are tools for changing society. In 2013, only a matter of months after being shot by the Taliban, while inaugurating the large and impeccably modern library in Birmingham, England, she urged, “There is no greater weapon than knowledge and no greater source of knowledge than the written word.”
Six months later, still not quite sixteen years old, she delivered another speech, this time at the United Nations, in which she was even more clear about her view of books as a revolutionary tool for social change (rather than dusty things kept in libraries or relaxing things to take to bed with a hot chocolate).
“Let us wage a glorious struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism, let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.”
When Yousafzai met with President Barack Obama, she challenged him on the drone strikes in Pakistan that had killed thousands of people: “Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”
Certainly her own love of reading and education had already caused a dangerous ripple effect in her homeland. Her views offended and indeed continue to offend large sections of traditional Pakistani society, yet in following these views she was not as much enacting a political strategy as living out her earnest ethical convictions. These convictions were, Yousafzai has always been clear, to a large extent inherited from her father.
It seems her father had recognized and chose to nurture in Yousafzai something very special, even allowing her to stay up at night and talk about politics long after her two brothers had been sent to bed! In fact, her father’s own story is a pretty remarkable one, if less colorful than Malala’s, and also deserves to be remembered as it presents a needed contrast to stereotypes of Pakistani society that disempower the many educated and liberal voices in this diverse land.
Ziauddin Yousafzai was a teacher who had run a school in the village that admitted girls as well as boys. It was quite a large school, by Western standards, with over a thousand pupils, roughly half girls and half boys. In a 2013 interview with PBS, Yousafzai praised her father, saying he inspired her because he was a great social activist and he spoke out for women’s rights even in what she calls “that hard situation.” A determination to speak out and express your beliefs and convictions is one of the most important things that she learned from him. Her father’s tale too is all about the importance of books. As he explained in an interview: “I thought, let me start a school of my own, I will have more freedom to practise the vision that I have. I started my school with 15,000 rupees—about £100. It was very meager capital. But the big capital and the big power that I had was my passion, my conviction, my connection to the community. I was so happy that the school I started, with just three kids, had 1,100 students—500 girls and 600 boys—by 2012.”
But back to the daughter. The media feeding frenzy over “the little girl the Taliban shot,” which started with Time magazine naming her (for three years running!) as one of the most influential people in the world, included numerous international prizes, such as being crowned the UN Messenger of Peace, and reached its peak with an asteroid being named after her!
A darker response, though, came from the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, which claimed to represent 150,000 schools. Just a month after Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the federation announced an “I Am Not Malala” day, during which children at the schools were taught to condemn Malala Yousafzai and her ideas. Yet such bitterness and hostility was misdirected. After all, Malala wasn’t just “Malala” either, as she herself put it later. On the contrary, she says, “I tell my story not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story of many girls.”
That message is reflected in a book that the young Malala wrote, called Malala’s Magic Pencil. This, despite obvious and forgivable shortcomings, became a huge best seller. The plot involves a girl, herself in symbolic form, longing for a magic pencil with which to “draw a better world.” As none shows up, the girl instead dedicates herself to her schooling and realizes that she must instead use the ordinary tools around her to build a better world—a moral that is actually pretty similar to that in the novelist Paulo Coelho’s tale of the alchemist, of which more in a moment. The solution was within her all along, we might say!
“Books and pens” are our most powerful weapons in the struggle for global justice, she says. But which books inspired her? One that she mentions often is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a tale about a shepherd’s search for treasure. Of course, the treasure the shepherd seeks is not where he imagines but rather lies much closer to home. As in Coelho’s other works, the constant theme is that each of us are part of an unfolding cosmic story.
Yet even if Yousafzai particularly cites Coelho’s book The Alchemist as an early inspiration, it is actually Aleph (2011) that most clearly provides a lesson for where she is today. In is in this, his fourteenth book, Coelho describes life as not merely a “train” but a journey needing a destination. The book recounts a middle-aged man’s journey on the Trans-Siberian railway, replete with lurching carriages and nights spent listening to the clatter of the train wheels. The man is a successful but discontented writer. He’s traveled extensively and earned worldwide acclaim for his books, but he finds himself lost and dissatisfied. At this point, a wise figure referred to simply as “J” inspires him through a story about the humble and ubiquitous bamboo plant. It seems, you see, that bamboo initially exists only as a tiny green shoot while its root system grows underground, invisible to the naked eye. Then, after years of apparent inactivity, it suddenly shoots up and can quickly reach the height of a house.
ALEPH
AUTHOR: PAULO COELHO
PUBLISHED: 2011
This is a novel, an autobiography, and a work of philosophy. The book tells the story of the author’s “epiphany” (meaning spiritual awakening) while traveling on the Trans-Siberian railway. “Aleph” is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and is offered here as the receptacle of many deep and even mystical meanings.
In Aleph, Coelho writes, “Many things in life, personal and professional, are like the Chinese bamboo. You work, invest time, energy, do everything possible to nurture your growth and, sometimes, you don’t see anything for weeks, months or even years. But if you have the patience to keep working, to keep persisting and nurturing, your fifth year will arrive and with it will come changes that you hadn’t even dreamed of. Remember that one must be very daring to reach great heights, and at the same time, a lot of depth to stay grounded.”
In real life, Coelho describes meeting people on the journey, including a twenty-one-year-old reader who insisted she had many things to talk to him about. “We met on the train and there was this connection between her, me and my books. I was old enough to be her grandfather but there is no age limit for people to act as a catalyst in your life,” he told one interviewer, adding, “Of course, I don’t take the Trans-Siberian every day but I try to give every day the opportunity for these experiences. If you’re open to people on your way to work, it can happen. Or you can choose to be totally inwards and think only of yourself. You have to live in the moment.”
The critical reception for what was, by then, Coelho’s fourteenth book was cool. Julie Bosman introduced her New York Times interview with Coelho about the novel by calling him “a Twitter mystic.”
A curious story told about the book, or rather the author, is that Coelho was always reluctant to allow others to modify his original tale, for example, in the process of translation. In an interview with the website Goodreads, he insisted that the book had “a life of itself,” and this he felt had to be respected, thus giving a new sense to the term “book rights.” An incident in 2003 reveals something about this and Coelho’s commitment to these values. At this time, he allowed Warner Bros. to buy the film rights to his book, but it soon turned out that his idea of the book and the vision of the film producers were ultimately incompatible, the project stalled, and the movie never materialized. It seems that, among other inessential things, at one point the script envisioned a Hollywoodstyle battle sequence with ten thousand soldiers, something that, for the author, was definitely “not what the book is about.” And, according to the Guardian newspaper, so strongly did Coelho feel the tug of authenticity that he offered $2 million to Warner Bros. to buy the film rights!
Pointing out Coelho’s resolution to follow his personal legend and put art before dollars brings us back to the extraordinary story of Oprah Winfrey, whose success is all the more remarkable given that she started, on the face of it, with so many of life’s cards stacked against her.
Given this, it’s almost incredible to think that in 1998, at only forty-four years old, Winfrey would be named “One of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century” by Time magazine. But then, Winfrey is a very determined character. One story told about her is that just two days after the future media mogul started kindergarten, she complained to her teacher, saying, “I don’t think I belong here ’cause I know a lot of big words.” The teacher agreed and moved Winfrey to the first grade.
Winfrey’s knack for seizing opportunities began to kick in when she moved to Tennessee to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber. While still in high school, she landed a job in radio as a reporter for a Nashville radio station, and at age nineteen she became the first African American to anchor a local evening news show. Her ability to deliver emotionally powerful questions and responses soon led to the opportunity to present a daytime talk show. This rapidly became the nation’s favorite and won no fewer than thirty-four Emmy awards—seven of them awarded to Winfrey for best host. It’s no wonder, then, that in due course she launched her own internationally syndicated production company. Throughout, the hallmark of her shows was a focus on self-healing and personal change.
It’s quite a story, and many books have and will be written about Winfrey’s achievements, but books also helped Winfrey along the way and inspired what would become for her a highly lucrative business strategy that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with business.
In an interview with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of the social networking site LinkedIn, Winfrey revealed that one book in particular came to her at a pivotal moment of doubt and helped shape all her future endeavors. In 1988, Winfrey had invited white supremacists to her talk show in an effort to gain insight into the source of their hatred. She immediately regretted this decision as it seemed to have given those people a recruiting platform to spread their hatred. (Twenty years later, two of those guests, now reformed, confirmed those suspicions to her.) Faced with doubt about how to recover from this misstep, Winfrey turned to a book called The Seat of the Soul by philosopher Gary Zukav. Published in 1989, the book was a sensation, a no. 1 New York Times best seller for thirty-one weeks.
Zukav, who was already famous for his new-age investigations of personal psychology and quantum physics (including one of my own favorite reads, The Dancing Wu Li Masters), offers a grand cosmological theory in The Seat of the Soul: “Each soul enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals, or take on a particular task. All of your experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.”
For individuals this means one thing. Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for everything we do, which is to say, for our every intention.
THE SEAT OF THE SOUL
AUTHOR: GARY ZUKAV
PUBLISHED: 1989
The central idea of this book is that humanity is evolving from a species that pursues power based on the perceptions of the five senses—external power—into a species that pursues a different kind of power that is based on spiritual values. This is what Zukav calls “authentic power.” He contrasts the two kinds of activity, arguing that the pursuit of external power generates conflict—between individuals and lovers, within communities, and between nations—and has brought us to the edge of destruction.
Instead, authentic power “infuses” the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust and makes them come alive with meaning and purpose. Embracing the values of the soul transforms marriages into spiritual partnerships and reorients all aspects of our everyday lives.
“Reach for your soul. Reach even further, the impulse of creation and power authentic, the hourglass point between energy and matter, that is the seat of the soul. What does it mean to touch that place? It is exciting to come of age spiritually.”
Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT and himself the author of a book called The Religions of Man, called the book “remarkable” and complimented Zukav, saying that “one of our finest interpreters of frontier science” had shown himself to be equally able to explain and understand the human spirit. Many others, however, were unconvinced.
In an interview by the clinical psychologist and author Jeffrey Mishlove for the Public Television series Thinking Allowed, Zukav summarized the idea behind his book like this:
My objective was not to make the soul legitimate in terms of science. The soul is legitimate, period. It doesn’t need validation. At least that was my perception and so I wrote The Seat of the Soul to share the things that were most important to me. The Dancing Wu Li Masters was designed to open the mind, and The Seat of the Soul is a book designed to open the heart. And this is often the sequence that many people encounter as they move into an expanded awareness of who they are and why they are here.
This principle of intention became a guiding light for Winfrey. “The number one principle that rules my life is intention,” Winfrey told Weiner. “And that is actually one of the reasons why I let the show go,” she said, referring to giving up her talk show in 2011 to start her cable network called, significantly, OWN.
Zukav distinguishes between two kinds of do-gooders: those who are motivated by the positive effects of their actions on the recipients and the world and those who are really concerned with doing things that make them, well, feel good. Sooner or later the people on the end of actions that are really motivated by the second intention begin to resent being used like this.
From reading Zukav, Winfrey realized that for years the intention that had been driving her personal life and career had been the desire to be liked rather than a true strategy to do good in the world. And later, when invited to write the preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Seat of the Soul, she explained in more detail how, after reading Zukav’s book, she had called a big meeting with all the TV show’s producers and announced a new strategy: “We are going to be a force for good, and that is going to be our intention.”
Specifically, Winfrey had decided that there would be no more cooking segments with recipes for food she wouldn’t dream of eating herself, and certainly no episodes during which, for example, audience members argued with white supremacists, as had happened on one show.
Winfrey also explained that there had been plenty of times where she’d heard ideas for the show that had plenty of details but no positive intention, and so from now on she would turn these down. Finally, she said, there were times when she felt that producers were manufacturing an intention that they themselves didn’t believe in. She’d no longer accept this sort of inauthenticity.
Authenticity had become the key. In fact, Winfrey says, this philosophy still drives everything she does: “Do not bring me an idea that I cannot find my thread of truth in,” as she told an audience at Skidmore College in 2017. She felt this so strongly that she even decided to end her hit TV show when she did because she felt that she had done all she could with it. She wouldn’t allow herself to feign enthusiasm for her work just to continue a profitable venture.
On the other hand, her admiration of Zukav led to him being invited on her talk show thirty-six times, and she has said that The Seat of the Soul continues to inspire the work she does on her network OWN. Her newest show, Belief, is dedicated to exploring the power of spiritual experience as a force for good across the globe. The most recent edition of The Seat of the Soul includes a preface by Winfrey in which she says that “quite frankly, I don’t believe I would ever have dreamed of creating such a network had I not read The Seat of the Soul.”
That’s quite an endorsement, but what sort of book is it, really? As to that, opinions are mixed. Very mixed. Zukav has been accused of ungrounded pseudoscience, and Winfrey has been called out for rushing uncritically into areas where wiser heads would have hesitated to go. Zukav’s philosophy also seems derivative of other schools of thought. He offers nonattachment as the key to acceptance, but this is a position Buddhists have revered for centuries. He suggests that some truths must be accepted through commitment rather than understanding, but again this is a position others, such as the much-admired Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, are famous for having proposed. Last but not least, there’s a passage in Zukav’s book about dolphins who decided to beach themselves in mass protest of life on earth. “This is their way of refusing to continue to live upon the Earth,” explains Zukav earnestly. “They feel that they cannot fulfill the purpose for which they are born.” This idea is certainly original to Zukav, but to recycle an old favorite barb of critics, if parts of his book are good and parts are original, it seems unfortunately that the original parts are not the good ones.
This is not to say that Zukav’s writings cannot still serve a valuable purpose. Writers can be great communicators even if poor innovators. Zukav’s book on physics, for example, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, deconstructs the Chinese name for physics, Wu Li, explaining that it has many subtle dimensions and can variously mean (depending on how it is pronounced) “patterns of organic energy,” “my way,” “nonsense,” “I clutch my ideas,” or “enlightenment.” Zukav uses these shades of meaning to create the book’s sections. The concept of “nonsense,” for example, he uses to throw light on the otherwise baffling insights of Einstein’s relativity theory and lead into discussions of some of the equally strange ideas of the ancient Eastern philosophical tradition.
But back to Winfrey and her own explorations of new-age philosophy. In 2007, Winfrey began to endorse a self-help program called The Secret, based on a book and film by an Australian television writer and producer called Rhonda Byrne. The central message of this (echoing Zukav but otherwise unrelated) was that people could change their lives through positive thoughts or vibrations that would, in turn, attract more positive vibrations and in due course bring many of the good things in life. It seems in one sense to fit Oprah’s model of entrepreneurs with good intentions, but the initiative soon became mired in controversy. Peter Birkenhead of Salon magazine argued that this approach was psychologically damaging and accused it of trivializing important decisions and promoting a quick-fix mentality. Even Winfrey’s stepfather, Vernon Winfrey, publicly condemned her new idea, saying, “That is not how I raised Oprah Gail” and that these days he found that he needed the show “like a hog needs a holiday.”
THE SECRET
AUTHOR: RHONDA BYRNE
PUBLISHED: 2006
The Secret is Byrne’s best-known book, promising to share with its readers nuggets of wisdom culled from world philosophies and religion that will help them to find success in every aspect of life, from relationships to health to wealth. The idea is that, well, “the secret” information that the book summarizes will enable readers to tap hitherto unsuspected “hidden powers” that lurk within them. It is a kind of revelation that is “life-transforming” for all who experience it.
The central idea of the book is that there is a kind of “law of attraction,” which claims that thoughts can change a person’s life directly. She says that all great men in history, such as Plato, Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven, Winston Churchill, and even Jesus, knew about and applied the law. She writes, “The Secret is the law of attraction! Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life. And it’s attracted to you by virtue of the images you’re holding in your mind. It’s what you’re thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind you are attracting to you.”
The book has sold thirty million copies worldwide and has been translated into fifty languages. However, some readers complained that it was not so much secret insights as “regurgitated trivialities,” or even “absolute drivel,” as one dissatisfied customer put it. The New York Times said caustically that the book might best be understood as “an advanced meme” (or intellectual virus) “whose structure has evolved throughout history to optimally exploit a suite of weaknesses in the design of the human mind.”
The problem is, as Winfrey has found and Yousafzai doubtless will do too in time, that it is not enough to start along a particular path in life, whether inspired by a book or a person or something completely different, you have to be able to navigate along that route too, avoiding pitfalls. An inspirational book can only be a starting point—it can’t substitute for having your own inner guidance system. Or—let’s be generous—maybe what is needed is a constant supply of new, inspirational books to keep us all on track.