Thinking-Rich.com

Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn’t changed who I am. My feet are still on the ground. I’m just wearing better shoes.

Oprah Winfrey

You have to be who you want to be before you’ll become wealthy. Money won’t make you smarter, won’t make you get along with your in-laws any better, won’t make you irresistable to either sex in any real way. You’ll still be the same poor you.

For Oprah, that’s a good thing. She knows exactly who she is and she did exactly what was needed to become wealthy. For one thing, she worked her ass off. Back in the day when there were few black people on television at all, Oprah was overweight, black, female (there’s your three strikes) and wanted to change the world in her own way. She was thrown a lot of crap, but she never let it touch what was real inside her.

She was “Oprah” before the world could possibly know what that meant.

So she did everything she needed to do to become wealthy - as long as it fit with her vision of herself. As long as she could keep her feet on the ground and look at herself in the mirror.

OK, we all know what an inspiration she is and how perfect she is and blah blah blah. But I don’t think she would ever describe herself like that. Her feet are on the ground.

Nonetheless, I think we’d all be closer to wealth - closer to all the blessings life offers - if we really knew and believed in our inner “Oprah.” I don’t yet know mine. I’ve seen glimpses, but I’ve got so much work to do. I’m a dreamer. I sometimes have more ideas in a day than I could implement in a lifetime. Sometimes just trying to write down all the possibilities is exhausting, and ultimately defeating.

I don’t have my feet on the ground yet. Still, my inner Oprah is somewhere inside me. And she’s waiting for me work out my warped sense of priorities and my skewed vision of what wealth is. What I - and you - will someday become is exactly who are, without the baggage, without the limitations of scarcity, without fear.

Our feet will be firmly planted in abundance and we’ll be wearing some damn fine shoes.