Super Soul Summer: Wes Moore - Is Your Job Your Life's Purpose

Oprah's Super Soul

Oprah

Society & Culture

4.6 • 32.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Original Air Date: May 21, 2018 Enjoy this episode, specially selected for our Super Soul Summer—a series celebrating some of the greatest Super Soul moments and messages to inspire and uplift your spirit. Enjoy this episode, specially selected for our Super Soul Summer—a series celebrating some of the greatest Super Soul moments and messages to inspire and uplift your spirit. Does this sound like you? After years working at the same job, you realize you've just been going through the motions for as long as you can remember. Wes Moore, a war veteran, entrepreneur, Rhodes Scholar and New York Times best-selling author, believes we can all discover and pursue our life’s purpose. “If your job no longer brings you joy, there's an important question you need to ask yourself: ‘What is your real work and who will you fight for?’” In his book “The Work,” Wes, a former combat officer in Afghanistan, a White House Fellow and a Wall Street banker, discusses his journey of self-discovery, which led him to walk away from financial success to create a more meaningful life.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most
0:07.8	valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey
0:16.6	to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.
0:24.4	Author and speaker Wes Moore is born in Baltimore in 1978.
0:28.4	Wes was only three years old when a rare virus claimed his father Wesley's life.
0:33.1	His mother moved the family to the Bronx and struggled to send Wes and his sisters to
0:37.4	private school,
0:38.3	but Wes felt caught between two worlds. He became a discipline problem. His grades plummeted,
0:44.5	and he was put on academic and disciplinary probation. At 13, his mother sent him to military school.
0:51.4	After four attempts at running away, Wes says he eventually learned to respect
0:55.8	himself and others. By graduation six years later, he was company commander of 125 cadets.
1:03.1	Wes went on to Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated five beta Kappa. In 2000, the same year
1:09.5	West was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he discovered there was another
1:12.8	young man, also named Westmore, who grew up just blocks away from his own childhood home.
1:19.4	The other Westmore was awaiting trial for felony murder and was later sentenced to life in prison
1:26.0	without parole.
1:30.1	The story of their two divergent lives became the basis of his best-selling book, The Other, Wes Moore.
1:35.4	Today, Wes says, in order to come alive,
1:38.4	we need to embrace living and working for something greater than ourselves.
1:43.4	He believes that success and service are intertwined.
1:46.7	It is the focus of his book, The Work. One of the things that you crystallize so beautifully in
1:52.5	the work is that the one thing I think all of us are searching for is a life that matters and a life
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Oprah, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Oprah and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.