Oprah Winfrey has only one regret in her decades-long reign as a media mogul.
Winfrey is widely recognized for her tenure as a successful journalist who went on to host and produce “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” After departing from Nashville, TN, to pursue a career in Baltimore, MD, working local news, she landed her own syndicated show. According to CBS News, she was just 22 years old when she transferred cities and spent eight years working as a 6 p.m. anchor at WJZ-TV.
Winfrey later landed her talk show, “A.M. Chicago,” which was renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1986. It became the top-rated show, overtaking Phil Donahue, who had maintained the status for nearly 20 years.
“For a long time, I wondered why it took so long for someone to copy us,” Donahue said, per CoastTV. “Then along came Oprah Winfrey. It is not possible to overstate the enormity of her impact on the daytime television game.”
The success of Winfrey’s show is proven in its number. It reportedly was the top show for 24 consecutive seasons, drew in 40 million viewers weekly, and was viewed in 145 countries, Oprah.com mentioned.
Beyond the show, Winfrey scaled her presence in the media landscape by launching The Oprah Magazine in 2000. When she departed her popular talk show in 2011 after 25 seasons, she scaled her ownership in media with the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
“In April 2007, David Zaslav, the head of Discovery, came to me holding an O magazine, talking about the fact that his wife had given it to him and that he wanted to create a channel based on living your best life because he thought the magazine did such a great job of executing that idea,” she recalled, according to Oprah.com. “So I took him into my office and showed him what I’d written in my journal. And I felt instinctively like, ‘Oh my God, so this is how it happens.’ I realized it was of divine order when he came to see me based upon what I had done in the magazine. He didn’t say, ‘Let’s create another Oprah show.’ He said, ‘What you’re doing is really perfect for a channel—how do we create a channel that helps people the same way your magazine does?’ So I said, ‘Oh my goodness! This is a sign!’”
Today, Winfrey, who is now a billionaire, reflects on her career trajectory. In doing so, she admits her decision to launch the network while retiring from the show was her “one regret.”
“I would not have taken on the responsibility of trying to build a network [OWN] while still ending the show. That is my one regret,” she told “TODAY.” “I should have handled all of that differently, I think. I should have completed one thing, taken a year to do nothing, and then decided what was the next thing for me to do.”
She continued, “I’d made a decision that it was time for the show to end. I don’t regret that. What I do regret is trying to do multiple things at the same time. I would have done the thing that I tell everybody else to do: ‘When you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Get still with yourself and do nothing.’ I would have given myself that time.”
