Oprah’s life lessons
Born into hardship, Oprah Winfrey, 67, suffered a tough childhood blighted by sexual abuse and a tragic pregnancy. After getting clean from a crack cocaine addiction, the US chat show legend finally turned her life around and has become one of the most influential – and most talked about – women in the world, with an estimated £2 billion fortune and a long list of exclusive celebrity interviews under her belt, including her recent sit-down with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. This is what she’s learned along the way...
FAILURE IS LIFE MOVING US
IN ANOTHER DIRECTION
At the age of 13, Oprah was sent to a juvenile detention home due to bad behaviour. At
18, she went to university to study media and landed a job as a reporter for a Nashville radio station. Soon after, she became the first African-American anchor on the city’s TV station. She said, “I know what it feels like to not be wanted… you can use it as a stepping stone to build great empathy for people. For every one of us that succeeds, it’s because there is somebody there to show you the way out. If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher and higher, the law of averages predicts that you will at some point fall… Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
FIND YOUR PURPOSE
AND SET A VISION
In 1991, Oprah testified in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee in a bid to establish a national database of convicted child abusers. Two years later, President Clinton signed the Oprah Bill into law. Oprah said afterwards, “A lot of people don’t know their purpose in life. So if you don’t know your purpose, your immediate goal is to figure it out. Otherwise, you’re just wandering around aimlessly. Before you embark on any quest, you must first set your vision.”
HEAL YOUR CHILDHOOD WOUNDS
Born to a poor couple in Mississippi,
Oprah was raised by her grandmother. Her childhood was blighted by sexual abuse and rape and Oprah fell pregnant at 14, but her baby was born prematurely and died. She said, “I became pregnant and hid the pregnancy. I’d intended to kill myself, actually. I thought there’s no way other than killing myself. My father called [the loss of the baby] ‘a second chance’. I took in those words as a mantra throughout my life that helped me to reach the level of success today. If you don’t heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future. I am so grateful for my years living in poverty, because it makes the experience of creating success and building success that much more rewarding.”
LOVE YOURSELF FIRST, THEN EXTEND IT TO OTHERS
Oprah met former basketball player Stedman Graham in 1986 and they got engaged in 1992 – though they still remain unmarried. Oprah said, “Your life is a journey of learning to love yourself first and then extending that love to others in every encounter. I saw relationships not solely as the kind of romantic pursuit our society celebrates, but as a spiritual partnership that’s meant to change how you see yourself and the world. As for marriage, that requires a different way of being. [Stedman’s] interpretation of what it means to be a husband and what it would mean for me to be his wife would have been pretty traditional – and I would not have been able to fit into that.”
KEEP A GRATITUDE JOURNAL
Oprah began a book club in the mid-’90s and all the selections became bestsellers. She also launched a magazine called O in 2001, which at the time sold 2.5million copies a week. She said, “I had accumulated more wealth, more responsibility, more possessions; everything, it seemed, had grown exponentially. So I made gratitude a daily priority. I went through the day looking for things to be grateful for, and something always showed up. For years I’ve been advocating the power and pleasure of being grateful. I kept a gratitude journal for a full decade without fail – and urge you all to do the same.”
BECOME SO SKILLED AT YOUR JOB THAT
YOUR TALENT CAN’T BE DISMISSED
After being fired for being too emotional while reporting stories in her role as an anchor in Baltimore, Oprah was head-hunted to co-host a TV talk show, People Are Talking. She said, “My bosses certainly made no secret of their feelings – they told me I was the wrong colour, the wrong size, and that I showed too much emotion. It wasn’t until I was unceremoniously ‘demoted’ that I experienced the first spark of what it means to become fully alive. Your job is not always going to fulfil you… The number one lesson I can offer you is to become so skilled, so vigilant, so flat-out fantastic at what you do that your talent cannot be dismissed.”
CREATING INTERNAL BELIEF WILL REFLECT ON YOUR OUTER WORLD
As a teen, Oprah smoked crack cocaine with an ex-boyfriend, but quit when the relationship ended. She said, “In the beginning [of life], I made a lot of mistakes. I made the wrong choices. And I have to this day gone over and over it in my mind. [But] the only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. The more you create belief internally, the more it will reflect in your outer world.”
‘I know how it feels to not be wanted’