According to Forbes, Oprah Winfrey is one richest self made woman in America. Over the years, Oprah has singlehandedly built a name and lagacy for herself that only a very few people can boast of doing without any financial backing or help from a rich sponsor.
From a very early age, her goal was to become famous. In junior high, when she was asked to fill in one of those “Where Will I Be in Twenty Years?” forms every child is confronted with at some point or other, Oprah checked the box marked “Famous.”
Now, here are some hidden success story you probably didn’t know about the TV star.
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At First, She Didn't Want The Show That Skyrocketed Her Career
Oprah first began her career in 1976 with a television station in Baltimore Her job then was to visit a different Baltimore neighborhood each day to interview local people.
Typical of Oprah, she judged her role primarily in terms of how it could increase her own popularity. “It's good P.R. for me,” she explained, “It was a great way of introducing me to the city.”
But sadly just eight months after her appointment, she lost her prestigious position as co-anchor and was demoted to “weekend features reporter,” which, by her own admission, was the lowest position in the newsroom hierarchy.
When she was chosen as the host of a new morning show, People Are Talking, she felt she had finally reached rock-bottom. Her boss at the time recalls: “She really wanted to be a news person. She knew that news was all that mattered in television at the time. She saw daytime as a real come-down, a failure. She started crying. ‘Please don't to this to me,’ she begged. It’s the lowest of the low.’ ... What I was offering her was a real job and, quite frankly, she had no other option.” Oprah finally agreed to do it, but she left his office with tears in her eyes.
However, being a true born star, Oprah turned the situation in her favor and made the best of the show that later launched her career into greater heights.
According to Oprah after interviewing two actors from her favorite soap opera, All My Children, in the TV show she felt like she had finally found her place in television. “I came off the air, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do ... This is it. This is what I was born to do ... It just felt like breathing. It was the most natural process for me." Her show was so successful that it was soon picked up for national viewing.
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She Used Her Story In Her Favor
Following the success of her show, Oprah wanted to be of help to other young struggling women who were like her or grew up in the type of background that she did.
In the late 1990s, Oprah started a series of “Change Your Life” shows. She told her story of how she overcame a difficult and abusive childhood and went on to craft a career for herself and became the world’s first black self-made billionaire.
Oprah Was Overweight
You probably didn't know that the beautiful Oprah you see today, was once an overweight child. As a little girl Oprah had never even dared to dream of being on the cover of Vogue.
However, when Vogue reached out to her to be on their cover and the magazine’s editor told Oprah, who was overweight for much of her life, that she would have to lose weight before she would be invited to pose for the cover, the TV personality quickly decided it was time to shed some fat.
She enrolled in a weight-loss boot camp, followed a strict diet and trained hard to make it onto the cover of Vogue. In October 1998, Oprah’s Vogue cover hit the newsstands. It went on to sell 900,000 copies, more than any other issue in the magazine's 110-year history.
She Was Once A Drug Addict
On one of her talk shows, Oprah invited a drug addict onto her talk show and there confessed that she had also been a drug addict.
She spoke about how damaging drug addiction could be and how it also ruined her life. She also spoke about her sister who was a drug addict and how she sold sold the story of Oprah’s unwanted teenage pregnancy and drug abuse to a tabloid newspaper just for some change.
Over the years, Oprah have encouraged people to talk about their problems as that is only when solutions begin to come in.