Media mogul Oprah Winfrey has disclosed one decision in her career that continues to weigh her down today. In a chat with Al Roker on “Today”, Winfrey, now 70, looked back on her life’s highs and lows as Roker also celebrated turning 70.
Reflecting on the end of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2011, Winfrey revealed her one regret: rushing into a new project too soon after the show’s finale.
“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 said. “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.”
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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.”
Winfrey explained that she felt pressure from those around her to “leverage this moment” to create something new when her show’s ending put so much attention on her. After 29 seasons, she said she wanted “a break.”
“Everybody has that natural life force instinct inside yourself that lets you know what’s right or wrong, or that is your emotional GPS system, and any time I’ve ever gone against that, any time, is when I’ve made a mistake,” Winfrey confessed. “Every time I’ve just gotten still and listened to what my gut said — what that still small voice that resides inside me and you and everybody else says — I would never have made a mistake.”
Winfrey now places high value on rest and downtime. According to her, the simple pleasures in life bring her the most happiness.
“If it’s a rainy day, I’m in love with life. You know why? No expectations,” she said. “Nobody expects you to go out on a rainy day. If it’s bright sun everybody’s like, ‘Come on, let’s do that that that.’ I love myself a rainy day. Rainy day, a fireplace, a blanket, and a dog at your foot and a great book? That’s it. That’s it for me.”
When asked if she’d be the same person if her show started now instead of in 1986, Winfrey quickly responded, “no.”
She takes pride in having been able to tackle topics on her show that people otherwise wouldn’t have felt free to discuss without that platform.
“It was a different time,” she said. “I often think about this just even in terms of The Oprah Show and the immense range of subjects that we covered on a daily basis. We were just talking about what was going on in people’s lives in a real and meaningful way. Raising children, overcoming cancer, stepping away from abuse. Every single imaginable dysfunction in our culture, that Oprah Winfrey Show was able to address in a way that allowed people to see the best of themselves and the possibility of what could be.”
“I was just speaking in Grand Rapids and someone said, ‘You changed my life because you allowed me to see what I could be versus what I thought I had to be,’ which is really a great testimony for what a television platform could do,” she added.
