January 2019 - HTSAAIL™ of the Month - Oprah Winfrey

 

We are starting off 2019 BIG.

 

So what better way to begin than with one of the biggest figures in daytime television: Oprah Winfrey.

 

Oprah had dreams of becoming a journalist since seeing Barbara Walters on the “Today Show” on morning as a 16 year old in Nashville Tennessee.

 

By her late teens, Oprah became Nashville youngest and first black female television news anchor. By the time she was 22, she was recruited by a news network in Baltimore to co-anchor the 6 PM news.

 

The network decided she was very dull and stiff as a co-anchor and fired her. Oprah was absolutely devastated when she was fired and demoted to a writing and reporting gig. She did not succeed in this new job as her writing skills were not up to par and she was too caring on stories that required hard nosing reporting.

 

At one of the lowest moments in her career, Oprah realized that she had passion for human interest stories rather than hard news stories. An opportunity arose to co-host a failing show in the same network called “People are Talking.” With her personality and wonderful chemistry with her co-host, this show went on to be a successful hit for 5 years. New opportunities began calling in cities across the US, including Chicago.

 

Eventually Oprah went on to start her own show, which we all know of as “The Oprah Winfrey Show” which was one of the best shows on daytime television for almost a quarter of a century.

 

Oprah had become a billionaire and touched millions of lives over the years, but the failure did not stop there.  

 

In 2011, Oprah went on and created her own network called OWN. A year later, every media outlet considered her network an absolute flop. As Oprah described in her Harvard commencement speech:

“I was stressed and I was frustrated and quite frankly I was actually… I was embarrassed.”

By 2013, Oprah had turned her network around with a better connection to her audience and new shows that gained interest from the people.

 

 

As it shows, no matter how high you are in life, or what position you are in, failure reaches everybody, even Oprah. The difference is, do you quit and let failure win? Or do you learn from that failure, try again, and succeed?

 

The Job Network