Hi all, wish you all a happy new year! A new beginning and a fresh new start to achieve all the big dreams you have. This year I am focusing on not only having great experiences but also on writing a blog post about them, because for sure I know it would be fun to read this 10-20 years down the lane and reminisce this age. I hope I can get better with writing quality wise and regularity wise. So let’s get started with second blog of this year, about the first book I read in 2020.

“What I know for sure”, an amazing book by Oprah Winfrey. This was the best book to start a new year, with a perfect attitude and proper mood for new beginnings. Even better thing was I borrowed an audiobook from my library, read by none other than Oprah Winfrey. What a better way than listening to author reading his/ her own book! It was like an aunt/ teacher telling you facts through her own experiences and scenarios, which even we face. It was like a therapy session. And I just loved this experience. Audiobooks are becoming my favorite things no doubt, but this one surely was special among them all.

Oprah tells us about some of the key factors to focus at any time in life, May that be self love, May that be spirituality or may that be gratitude. She calls them the ‘things she knows for sure’. And that really is an amazing concept. With rapidly changing life, it’s a great question to ask yourself ‘what I know for sure?’ It’s great to know your constants , it’s always better to know what you want to be as a person, and what can you do for being that person! This book motivated me to do everything I do with my heart put in it.

Oprah writes a lot about self love in this book. Which is more talked about than implemented. She explained it so well. Self love is not all about treating you with expensive stuff it’s about letting you have the tiny pleasures you love without any guilt. Self love is not selfish. When she writes ‘how can you fulfill others, if you are not fulfilled yourself!’, I literally had tears in my eyes. This is such an easy concept to understand yet so easily ignored by us, if we are happy ourself we will make an attempt to make everyone around us happy. So keeping ourselves happy isn’t selfish, it has a direct impact on people around us. So go on and do all those things you always wanted to do, and kept postponing to feed someone else’s needs first.

She writes about her difficult childhood, her hard teenage and its impact on her adult life. She writes how despite of all those experiences she started being grateful to all the things she has, and that lead to a better life day by day. And it sounds logical, when we are being grateful for life we have, life gives us more things to be grateful for. Oprah tells how money is an important tool to have, and how we should be careful but also tells many experiences which tells us money can’t buy all the pleasures. It’s the mind that decides if we are happy and not the bank balance. She writes about spirituality with a deep heart. Her words depict how much she values spirituality. Again one of my favorite lines about spirituality would be ,’we are not human beings having spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having human experiences.’ And this changes everything, this changes a perspective to look at the life, this answers all the sufferings we have been through, this answers every loss and every gain. This single line tells us that this life is not merely to be lived, it to be learned from, it’s the way our soul is becoming more and more rich.

Overall, I am in love with this book. I don’t know it’s the new year motivation talking or it’s what I needed to hear at this phase of life. But listening to this book made me happy from inside. What I know for sure is I am going to bring more of such motivational books in my life!