What Oprah, Maya Angelou, and a box of leftover tile have to do with purpose

This past fall I moved from the beach to the Hollywood Hills. Both of my children had now graduated and were off to college, leaving me living alone, and it was time for a change. One afternoon as I prepared to move, I found myself sitting on the garage floor sorting through memorabilia and boxes of old photos. In one of the boxes I came across a photo of me at golf tournament in North Carolina in 1996. There I was, looking very 90s in Ray-Bans, a white polo shirt, and a wrap skirt that looked like a blue bandana. I had a big smile on my 23 year old face and my arm wrapped around Oprah, who was also smiling back, out from under a huge white sun hat.

The same summer this picture was taken, I had a pool put in at my new house. I bought my first house earlier that year with money I saved lifeguarding and my first real job in research. I had always wanted a pool and finally having one, at my own house, felt like a big deal. I decided I needed to do something special for the pool deck so before they poured the concrete I went down to the east side of town to an old tile shop. The place was typically only visited by contractors but the old man who owned the shop seemed slightly entertained that I showed up and was asking if he had any cool tile I could break up and embed in the concrete of my soon-to-be-poured pool deck.  I sorted through shelves and piles and old dusty boxes before finally discovering a box of mixed blue tiles that spoke to me.

“These are pretty cool,” I said to him. “How much for the box?”

“I’ll give it to you for $25,” he answered. “Ya know, those are left over from a big job we just finished at Maya Angelou’s house.”

I bought every piece of the tile he had. I carefully wrapped each in an old dish towel and broke them with a hammer, creating small mosaic-like pieces which I embedded in the concrete one at a time while it was still soft enough to press them down. It was a slow and tedious process, one that was inherently very intentional. It took hours, but I laid a single line of tile chunks all the way around the outer edge of the pool deck.

When the concrete contractor saw what I had done, he instructed the crew to give it one final brushing, burying every tile.

I spent the next two months with a hammer and a nail punch tool, carefully chipping each one back out to expose the range of blues I had so carefully set.

That was more than two decades ago. I still do research. I still love houses. In the past 6 months, I bought and renovated my eighth home and launched my own research firm. Around the time of my launch announcement, I was invited to a conference in Salt Lake City. The theme of the conference was breakthroughs. I didn’t think much about it. After I decided to attend, I learned that Oprah would be one of the keynote speakers.

Oprah was the closing speaker of the keynote sessions this morning.

She talked about intentions – being intentional, setting intentions, and having clarity of intention. She told a story about why she began setting intentions for each and every show she did and how that represented a breakthrough for her. She talked about how over the thousands of interviews she did over the years she noticed that regardless of who she interviewed, after the cameras stopped rolling they would look her in the face and ask, “was that okay?” Everyone from Obama (who spoke the day before) to Beyonce would ask the same question.

Oprah said as she reflected on that question, she realized that what it actually meant was, “Did you hear me? Did what I said mean anything to you?”

“We all just want to be heard,” she said.  As an interviewer this was meaningful to her. I thought about how as a researcher I spent much of my life interviewing people too.

She talked about how she saw her show as the biggest focus group ever and how it taught her so much about human nature and life. She talked about having an inside out view of the world and how we can learn so much by listening to others. She said she realized that her show wasn’t about a show and our jobs aren’t about a job, but about how we can use our inner selves in service to the world. It is only when we change the paradigm of the work we do that we become the fullest, highest expression of ourselves, she said.

I too have interviewed thousands of people over the past few decades. Not as a talk show host or journalist but as a researcher. I’ve traveled the world and met people of all ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds, on nearly every continent and talked about a little bit of everything: clothes, coffee, ridesharing, cars, tech, sneakers, razors…you name it. I gathered insights to help companies be more successful. I created strategies to launch products and grow brands and deliver on what people love and need. But I have often said that what I learned wasn’t actually about products or brands. What I learned was about people.

The connections I made with other humans across the planet are what drove me to do my job. That was where I found meaning and connection. It’s what made me realize that, just like Oprah said, my job isn’t about a job.

In her closing, Oprah said she is often asked who had influence on her life. She told a story about sitting in Maya Angelou’s kitchen discussing legacy and the reason we’re alive. This was the same kitchen of her house in Winston-Salem, NC where I bought a box of tile for $25 and relentlessly chipped them out one by one until they were all visible.

“There’s a bigger reason we’re alive,” Oprah says Maya Angelou told her that day in the kitchen. “Your legacy is every life you touch.”

Maya Angelou passed away in Winston-Salem in 2014. My little first house and my pool deck with fancy inlaid tile is still there, just as it was, only a few miles from where she lived, taught, and wrote.

Over the past few hours since her speech, I have been thinking about breakthroughs, intention, gratitude, and purpose. As I enter this next phase of my life, I’m excited to get back on the road and back to what I am called to do because I now see that my job isn’t really about a job. And sometimes breakthroughs come in the form of full circle moments that help you better define your purpose.