World Changers

When Oprah Winfrey ended her reign as the undisputed queen of daytime television on May 25, 2011, it was headline news around the world. For twenty-five years and more than forty-five hundred episodes, her provocative talk show held viewers riveted to their TV sets in more than one hundred countries. The Oprah Winfrey Show not only was one of the most top-rated programs in TV history, it also was a show that became a Chicago tourist attraction, attracted a million studio audience members, garnered forty-eight Emmys, and brought into viewers’ living rooms more than thirty thousand guests.

Winfrey’s decision to finally end the show at the age of fifty-seven is really a decision to significantly expand her entrepreneurial chops. She quit to take a more active role in her business empire, the core of which became a newly launched cable network called OWN. She had already leveraged her celebrity to create a highly successful magazine, O, and a powerful and influential book club.

Even to her, the success seemed improbable. Born to an unwed teenage mother, Oprah Winfrey spent her first years on her grandmother’s farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, while her mother looked for work in the North. Her grandmother taught her to read at an early age, and at age three Oprah was reciting poems and Bible verses in local churches.

But at the age of six, her world changed when she was sent to Milwaukee to live with her mother, Vernita Lee, who had found work there as a housemaid. From the ages of nine to thirteen, a number of male relatives and friends of her mother sexually abused her. When she tried to run away, Winfrey was sent to a juvenile detention home, only to be denied admission because all the beds were filled. At fourteen, she was out of the house and on her own.

After giving birth to a baby boy who died in infancy, she went to Nashville to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber and businessman. He was a disciplinarian, urging her to focus on her studies, telling her she was nothing less than an A student. She entered Tennessee State University on a full scholarship in 1971, but ultimately dropped out just a few credits shy of graduation to work as a reporter and news anchor at Nashville’s WTVF-TV.

In 1977 she moved to Baltimore to coanchor the six o’lock news, where she was also recruited to cohost a local talk show, People Are Talking. In 1984 Oprah relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV’s half-hour morning talk show, AM Chicago. The new show ran opposite Phil Donahue’s show, which had been the dominant TV talk show in Chicago for more than a decade. Within a month, Oprah was beating Donahue in ratings, and in less than a year, the show expanded to one hour and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In the beginning, the show focused on an array of hot-button topics from how to marry the person of one’s choice to how to freshen up one’s wardrobe. “I was just producing by the seat of my pantyhose,” Winfrey says. “We were living it and doing it and being a part of all the experiences we were showing. Girls in the office were looking for men, so we did a show about how to find a good man. One of the producers had AIDS, so we started doing shows about that.” In the early 1990s, however, Winfrey began to shift from the sensational stories that dominate daytime talk shows to focus on spiritual values, healthy living, and self-help, themes that were amplified in her monthly magazine.

If there was a single move that turned Winfrey, the television celebrity, into a true entrepreneur, it occurred in 1984 when she met Chicago entertainment lawyer Jeff Jacobs. At the time, Winfrey was merely looking for negotiating help with her new contract. Instead, Jacobs convinced her to take total control of her show and her celebrity, to create her own company rather than continue to be talent for hire, as most TV stars are. They established Harpo (Oprah spelled backward) in 1986, which would become the business vehicle that would enable Winfrey to leverage her celebrity into a real business.

Early in the company’s existence, Harpo, Inc., operated as a true entrepreneurial venture with no formal structure and a hectic, high-pressure work environment. As the company grew and the show became more and more popular, Oprah realized that she needed help building the true corporate foundation for her company. She hired her former boss, a TV station executive, as chief operating officer to build corporate departments—accounting, legal, and human resources—and to make Harpo, Inc., run as a business.

While the Oprah show became the core of the business, Winfrey also struck a pair of alliances—with TV syndicator King World to distribute her show and with ABC to air her TV movies. A Harpo movie division produces films like Tuesdays with Morrie. And in 2000, Oprah launched O, The Oprah Magazine, which became the most successful start-up magazine in publishing. One year after launch it reached a paid circulation of 2.5 million and earned $140 million in revenue.

Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe. When I was a little girl in Mississippi, growing up on the farm, only Buckwheat as a role model, watching my grandmother boil clothes in a big, iron pot through the screen door, because we didn’t have a washing machine and made everything we had, I watched her and realized somehow inside myself, in the spirit of myself, that although this was segregated Mississippi and I was “colored” and female, that my life could be bigger, greater than what I saw. I remember being four or five years old, I certainly couldn’t articulate it, but it was a feeling and a feeling that I allowed myself to follow. I allowed myself to follow it because if you were to ask me what is the secret to my success, it is because I understand that there is a power greater than myself, that rules my life, and in life if you can be still long enough in all of your endeavors, the good times, the hard times, to connect yourself to the source—I call it God, you can call it whatever you want to, the force, nature, Allah, the power—if you can connect yourself to the source and allow the energy that is your personality, your life force to be connected to the greater force, anything is possible for you. I am proof of that. I think that my life, the fact that I was born where I was born, and the time that I was and have been able to do what I have done speaks to the possibility. Not that I am special, but that it could be done. Hold the highest, grandest vision for yourself.

I have people that I trust. I also try to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am. I think that the ability to be as good as you can be comes from understanding who you are, and what you can and cannot do. And what you can’t do is far more important than what you can do, if what you can’t do is going to keep you from flying as high as you can.

I have a niece who is fifteen. Several years ago, I told her the same thing that my father said to me. I said, “You are too smart to get C’s.” I heard my father speaking. We were crossing the street one day, and she was talking about her grades. I said, “You are too smart to do that. You could be an A student.” And she said, “Do you really think I can?” “Oh, of course. You are such a bright person.” And she started getting A’s. A year later, she said, “Nobody ever told me I could.” I think that one of the most important lessons to learn is that we are all responsible for our lives. But nobody gets through this life alone. Everybody needs somebody to show them a way out, or a way up. Everybody does.

I feel best in surroundings where other people are smarter than I am because I feel like I can always learn something from it. One of the other big lessons that I’ve learned, particularly in business, is that you have a responsibility to yourself to learn as much about your business as you can. I sign every check. Although it is now tedious because the bills that come in from running and maintaining a studio—everything from Federal Express to Xerox, to every tape that needs to be repaired, and so forth—it gets to be a lot.

I have stacks and piles of checks to do, and I know that there are a lot of successful people who don’t do that. I still have a tenement mentality. I’ve been very poor in my life, and so the idea of having money and not being responsible and knowing how much money you have and keeping control of it is not something that I personally can accept. I know that there are other people who can, but it’s just not a possibility for me. I need to know where it is. There are times when I think I want to go to the bank and say, “Show it to me.” Because just seeing it on a piece of paper—anybody can print out a piece of paper. So I watch it very carefully and try to maintain responsibility for it.

I’ve already done the work of creating a team of people who understand not to propose a show idea to me unless there is an intention behind the idea. Tell me what the intention is first so that we know that the intention is in line with [Harpo’s] mission. It’s a broad mission, to transform the way people see themselves, to uplift, to enlighten, to encourage, to entertain. So you get a really broad canvas in which to do that, but whatever show idea you’re bringing me has to fit into that category.

Nobody’s journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. If things go wrong, you hit a dead end—as you will—it’s just life’s way of saying “time to change course.” So ask every failure—this is what I do with every failure, every crisis, every difficult time—I say, what is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don’t have to repeat the class. If you don’t get the lesson, it shows up wearing another pair of pants—or skirt—to give you some remedial work.

And what I’ve found is that difficulties come when you don’t pay attention to life’s whisper, because life always whispers to you first. And if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you’ll get a scream. Whatever you resist persists. But if you ask the right question—not why is this happening, but what is this here to teach me?—it puts you in the place and space to get the lesson you need.

My friend Eckhart Tolle, who’s written this wonderful book called A New Earth that’s all about letting the awareness of who you are stimulate everything that you do, he puts it like this: He says, don’t react against a bad situation; merge with that situation instead. And the solution will arise from the challenge. Because surrendering yourself doesn’t mean giving up; it means acting with responsibility.

There is the voice that everybody hears that is your parents’ voice, your professor’s [voice], it’s the world’s voice saying to you, “You should do this, you should be this, you ought to, you got to.” And then there is the still small voice—for some people it’s not so small—inside of every human being that calls you to something that is greater than yourself.

If you only desire to make money, you can do that. But what I will tell you—and I know this for sure too—is that the money only lasts for a while in terms of making you feel great about yourself. In the beginning, the money is to get nice things. And once you’ve gotten those nice things, I think some of the most unhappy people I know are the people who’ve acquired all the things and now they feel like, What else is there? What else is there? What else is there? And that feeling of “what else is there” is the calling—is the calling trying to say to you [that] there is more than this. There is more than this.

How do you know when you’re doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead. Every right decision I’ve made—every right decision I’ve ever made—has come from my gut. And every wrong decision I’ve ever made was a result of me not listening to the greater voice of myself

If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Even doubt means don’t. This is what I’ve learned. There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.

And when you do get still and let your internal motivation be the driver, not only will your personal life improve, but you will gain a competitive edge in the working world as well. Because, as Daniel Pink writes in his bestseller, A Whole New Mind, we’re entering a whole new age. And he calls it the Conceptual Age, where traits that set people apart today are going to come from our hearts—right brain—as well as our heads. It’s no longer just the logical, linear, rules-based thinking that matters, he says. It’s also empathy and joyfulness and purpose, inner traits that have transcendent worth.