Oprah's Best Lessons That Made Her Forbes’ Greatest Living Self-made American

Guess who's number one. Guess who's number one. Surprise. It's so fun. Guess who's number one is here. I think this is true. Would you all say for everybody who's on this, everybody who's in this room and on this list, isn't this your favorite thing to ever be a part of? Because I mean the fact that it is self-made, the fact that it is about the distance we've all traveled to be here, I think, is the thing that excites us all. And it's fair. It's democratic. I mean it's any... We all want to know how did it happen. There is, it's like choosing a Pope. There is a committee, but it's, I was talking with some folks before, we actually were debating, you know, if you're not a citizen, when were you, you know, you had to be at nine or a ten in terms of, you know, what does a nine or ten mean in terms of your journey if you grew up lower middle class? Is that, but we really focused on people who made it all the way, and you really deserve this, because if you think about where you started, I will say you're number one. We have a living list, but you're number one, and we have an all-time list, which is the deceased list, which you don't want to be on. Maybe someday we all would like to be on, but right now none of us want to be on that list, and Lincoln is number one. You and Lincoln, and Lincoln, because why? Who was born poorer than Lincoln in a log cabin, and he became not just a president, our great, you know, pretty universal, our greatest president, and you you've had a similar journey where you were born really, I mean from where you were to what you've done, you absolutely deserve this. This is so funny, so I often have gone, just like I know many of you have, to speak at schools, and I used to do elementary schools a lot. I don't do them much anymore, but I used to do elementary schools, and I'd start telling my story. I remember several times in a class, a little hand would go up at the end, and it seemed to be a little girl, little boy, and she'd say, did you know Abraham Lincoln? No, I didn't know Abraham Lincoln, but we did grow up similarly. So when you start out trying to explain to kids today, or even two decades ago, what it means to grow up with no running water, no electricity, and having to kill the hogs. In the 20th century. Yeah, in the 20th century, it's hard, or I mean, you know, remembering when there were party lines on the phone. We didn't even have a phone, so the people down the road, if somebody, if there was an emergency, you had to go down the road to use a phone, or they would call and say, somebody is calling. It was, yeah, but I love it. I love being able to sit on my porch now in Montecito, and listen to the frogs at night, that sound like the frogs in Mississippi, but the difference of time traveled, energy spent, work done, from Mississippi to Montecito, we can't, I just can't even imagine it. Yeah, it's incredible. I was struck by that line in that cool video, where you say that you, you didn't doubt that you would make it. How did you not doubt that? Well, I'm a woman of faith, so I was born to believe in God, but when I was coming up as a little girl, God was in a box, and now I have expanded to understand that God is in all, in every human being, in all things, and that there is a life force, whether you call it God or not, there's an energy, there's a force field that is a part of all of us, that helped us to be, that allowed us to be created. I always believed in God's dream for me. I believed that there was something bigger than my own life, like I was saying, being on the back porch, you know, with my grandmother, I always believed that whatever they were telling me, because the expectation for me in 1954 was that, my grandmother used to say, baby, I hope you grow up and get yourself some good white folks, like we have. Good white folks, my grandmother was a, was a, was a domestic worker, and so good white folks were people who allowed her to bring food home, who allowed her to use, you know, their old clothing, who allowed her to have hand-me-downs. She had, she would not even believe that I just, I think it's just the greatest honor, whether you're Jamie, Jamie Kern, or you were Jamie Kern Lima, or whether you're Anastasia, Anastasia is one of my favorite, favorite stories, because she came here not even speaking English, she learned how to speak English watching The Oprah Show, okay, and, and, and, and became this major entrepreneur, you know, billionaire, and you know, what John O'Brien has done, gone back and been able to help other people, and lift them up, and teach them how to be successful in their own lives, and perhaps maybe one day, billionaires. I mean, so I think for all of us, whether you're Chris Gardner, or whether you're, everybody in this room, it is so meaningful to be a part of something that, that acknowledges, you know, I've gotten a lot of awards. At one point, I stopped going to the Emmys, because the year Montel Williams won, I knew I should have won. The year Joan Rivers won, I knew I should have won, and my, my, my, my team was like, oh, I really want, they were always not good losers, and I said to myself, I'm not doing this anymore, because I know we're the best, we have the standard that we are the best, and so I'm not even gonna allow myself to even be put in competition, but this is just the, one of the reasons why I wanted to come here today, is because I wanted to say thank you for the acknowledgement of the distance traveled for all of us. Thank you, thank you, thank you to you and to Forbes for acknowledging this. We appreciate about all we're doing is seeing, you know, again, what you've done, and the thanks go to you. I mean, to think about the 1950s, talking about, listen, being a woman in the 1950s, being a, being a girl, being a black, black person, a black girl, a black girl in Mississippi, where there were no expectations for you whatsoever, but not even you, anybody you could probably point to and say, I can do that, so where did that motivation come from? Because there was nobody to even look at on, in a magazine and say, yeah, that. But I do remember the first night Dinah Ross and the Supremes were on the Ed Sullivan Show, that was 1964, and that was the first time there was anybody in the media that I thought I could identify with. I remember the first time Sidney Poitier was also on, won the Academy Award, 1964, 10. I was watching with, on the linoleum floor, and I remember the green chenille bedspread covering the sofas. I was babysitting one of my kids, and I remember the first thing I could say, except the Academy Award, were lilies of the field, and I had never seen such a distinguished, proud, honorable black man. We were called colored at the time. And I remember thinking, feeling inside myself, if he could do that, I wonder what I could do. I wonder what I could do. So little seeds were planted along the way, and I feel like I have been really divinely guided my entire life, and I've been paying attention to my instinct. There's nobody in this room who hasn't had to listen to, whether you call it the voice of God, whether you call it your instinct, whether you call it your intuition, you've gotten to where you've gotten to because you paid more attention to that than the outside voice is telling you what you could or could not do. But part of the reason you received and deserve this acknowledgement is because it wasn't even where you were born, how you were born, there were still hurdles. You were abused. I was raped at nine. You were raped at nine. You were pregnant at 13. You had a child at 14. So I'm not really not supposed to be in the fourth seat. Correct. So what I'm saying is not just that you were born, but then even your lived experience when you were a girl had to add weight to it. So what was it, you know, what was, when was the moment when you said, you know what, I've got this? Well, I remember, you know, I was raped at nine, sexually assaulted from the time I was nine until 14, and then finally that ended up in a pregnancy. I didn't even know what that was at the time, and the baby later died. And when I became pregnant at a time when I would have had to be removed from high school and would not have been allowed to continue going to school, which would have been the end for me. It would have been over, and I thought my life was over, and I had tried to actually, you know, harm myself to do whatever I could because I had so much shame about it. This is long before I understood that I was even being abused at the time. We didn't even call it that, you know. So I remember when the baby died, my father said to me, you now get a second chance. You now get a second chance. You will get to go back to school. I was a sophomore, and you will be able to complete school. So with this second chance, if I were you, I would take advantage of it, and that's what I did. I became, you know, a super high achiever. I was always an orator because I grew up speaking in the church, and so I believed that somehow I had, not somehow, I had to been given a second chance. And what I also understood from the very beginning when I started making money, one of the things that has been so exciting about my life, and I know yours, is because we've made every salary. We started out, I just love the fact that I started out with nothing. I remember my first job working in radio, and I was making a hundred dollars a week, and I just thought, oh my god, it's a hundred dollars a week. And when I was in television, moved on to television at 19, I was the youngest person ever to anchor the news, and certainly the only black person. But I've always walked into these spaces and felt like I belong there. And the reason I felt like I belong there is because I felt like God wouldn't have put me there, I wouldn't have had the opportunity if I wasn't supposed to be there. So I can honestly say I've never had a moment of imposter syndrome, because I've always felt, as Maya Angelou has said in many of her works, and in a particular point that she calls point to our grandmothers, I come as one, but I stand as 10,000. So when I walk into a space, I'm not walking into a space by myself, I'm walking into that space with everybody who's prayed me up. Everybody who ever wished or hoped or dreamed, everybody who was hung, everybody who was discriminated against, everybody who was denied, everybody who... I come with the strength and power of everybody who's come before me, whose shoulders I'm standing on. And I understood that even at a young age, because I was always reciting, you know, poetry from Langston Hughes, and, you know, life for me ain't been no crystal stair, it's had rocks in it, places on the floor bare, but all the time, son, I've been climbing, I've been reaching landings and going in the dark where there ain't no light. So I understood not only who I am, who I was, but I understood that I came from good stock, and I understood that the history of my people is what has allowed me to be in this place, all the sacrifices that lots of other people have made. So I didn't walk in with any shame about that or any kind of intimidation about that, I walked in with the power of that every time I walked into a room. Because I'm walking in with my great-grandmother, and I'm walking in with Constantine Winfrey, my great-grandfather, my great-grandfather who was an enslaved man and who went to his slave master and said, Master, if I pick 10,000 bales of cotton in a year, will you give me that piece of land over there, 80 acres? Constantine Winfrey. So he was the first landowner in our family, could not even write his name, but had the drive and will to pick 10,000 bales of cotton. And I will say that the fact that his owner allowed him to have the land and not to say, well, you need 10,000, you're two bales short. It was also, you know, a part of, you know, divine timing for him in that moment. So I come from all of that. And so I also knew this, and I know everybody in here is doing whatever you can philanthropically and using your life in service. I also knew that once I started to be successful, that the most important thing was, how do you become more purposeful with what you have? How do you use everything that you have, everything that you know, to bring light into somebody else's life? Because for me, I knew that, you know, this was not all of, this is not just my doing, you know. I'm God's child, and so therefore, to whom much has been given, much is also expected. And so how to do that? I made a lot, a lot, a lot of mistakes in the beginning, because I thought that if you gave people money and you tried to, you know, help them out of poverty or help them out of bad situations, that that would be the answer to it. So I remember in Chicago, when I first moved to Chicago, the first thing I did, my father said, find a church home. So I did. And then I started a program with the producers of my show, really each of us sort of adopting a girl from the projects. And we would take these young girls to get their library cards, we would take them on excursions, we would do these things. And I remember, after the first couple of years, two of the girls graduated and they went back to the projects in Cabrini-Green, and their mother beat them up. The mother beat them up because she said, how dare you come in here, you think you're now better than us because you now got an education? And I was so destroyed by that, devastated by that, so I said, I don't want to put another kid in that position. I tried taking people literally out of the projects. I'm going to buy you a home, and I'm going to give you a place to live, and make everything perfect for you. That did not work, because, as John O'Brien can tell you, you got to change the way people think about money, think about success. And if you just give people money who haven't had it, they actually don't know what it is. I said this to John a while back, I said, why is it every time you buy somebody a house, they don't understand the value of the house? Well, you don't understand the value of anything. So I learned this the hard way, never give anybody more money than they've already earned. If somebody asks you for $5,000, but all they've ever made is 500, they don't even know what 5,000 is. And so it took me a long time to figure that out, but what I really decided was, I wanted to be able to do for young girls what had been done for me. So I went and spent, I had the great, great, great benefit of spending 29 meals with Nelson Mandela. So I was doing my house in Montecito, the house wasn't going to be finished, as it never is finished on time. And anybody find a contractor to finish on time, let me know. Never is finished on time, and I was thinking, okay, what can I do this Christmas that would be, I thought I was going to be moving my house and have this, you know, beautiful Christmas. Now I can't do that. So I ended up going to South Africa. I had never met Nelson Mandela, but went to South Africa. Nelson Mandela invited Debbie and I to stay at his home. His home was the home base for us giving out toys and clothes to like thousands and thousands and thousands of kids. And I knew that that was just a temporary solve, right? Because you just give people things, it's not going to change anything. And people are like, well, you're just wasting your money. Well, I did that because on the Christmas, there was a Christmas when I was living with my mother in Milwaukee, Lee Street School, I was living with my mother in Milwaukee, and we were on welfare. And she called me into the room as I was the oldest, and she said, there will be no Santa Claus. There'll be no Christmas this year. I go, there's no Santa Claus and there's no Christmas. And she said, no. Now, when I heard this, I was 12 years old. Should have known there were no Santa. I was already on to that. But I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed because what is my story going to be when I go back to school tomorrow and everybody's talking about what they have? And around midnight, nuns showed up at our door, and these nuns brought gifts for my half-brother and sister and myself, and I never forgot that. So I wanted to do that for kids, to have that feeling, because I know the toys will leave, but you will never forget the feeling. It's the same thing with, you know, on The Oprah Show, Favorite Things, very famous for giving out, you get a car, you get a car, you get a car. Nobody's getting a car, by the way. Nobody's getting a car. You know, people, people, it's not about the car, it's not about the things, it's about this magic happened in this moment, this surprise, this thing. I thought I was just coming to a show and now all of a sudden, all of these wonderful things are happening to me. People don't forget the feeling of that, and so I wanted to create that for other people. So my great lesson in building a school with Nelson Mandela, the great lesson was when you are bringing in girls or boys or anybody from a challenged environment, do not think that just by writing a check and even putting them through school, even science and math, all these, all these girls are super, super, super, super smart, was not enough. That you have to look at where, what actually happened to the people that you are serving, and set up a system, set up a system in your philanthropy, set up a system that gives levels of support, because I brought in all these wonderful girls, found them at all, every province in South Africa, nine different provinces, and the first week they were all acting out, and I couldn't understand why they were acting out. I called Dr. Bruce Perry, who's the leading trauma expert in the United States, and he says, I think your girls are suffering from PTSD. I said, how can they be suffering from PTSD? They haven't been to war. And he said, poverty is war. Poverty is war. Not knowing where your next meal come from is coming from is war. Not knowing if your father is going to keep his job is war. Having your grandmother pass away, you know, at the time that I opened that school, one out of three people in South Africa were getting AIDS. So every single day that I opened, it's hard. You and I have talked about that school, and again, the lessons, but also what's most important is you try, you learn, you try again, you learn, you get better, and you help people. Can you talk about, I think part of what makes your journey so special, and you know, you talk about, you know, and that's a new story to me, Constantine Winfrey, the idea of owning, which you were way ahead of your time. You were, you know, I once, when I was a writer in the 40s and 90s, I once did a story on a Philadelphia guy named Bill Cosby, who got a third of the rerun rights from the Cosby Show, and he goes, and he goes, he goes, I was, I was not rich before. I was just well-paid. Now I'm rich. You were, you know, you were an amazing talk show host. Yeah, thank you, thank you. But you were not, you were not a Titan, though. But you were not a, you were not a media mogul. You were not a Titan. What was it? Was it, was it Constantine's peak? What was it that you, you had an instinct. Everyone thought you were crazy, like, what, you're gonna own your own show and syndicate it? You know, you didn't know that. Phil Donahue was doing this, and whoever's doing that, and you said, no, I'm gonna own it. I'm gonna create, and not only that, but own other things. What, what drove that? Well, what drove it was, I, I did this movie called Color, Color Purple back in 1985, and I never wanted anything more than I wanted the Color Purple. Jamie, you've heard this story. I never wanted anything more than I wanted to be in the Color Purple, and I had to give up all of my vacation in order to film the Color Purple, because I was just getting paid. At the time, I was getting paid two hundred. You had to call them sick on the second Friday. I was getting paid $235,000, which I thought, oh, that's it. I've now made it, but I had to say to my bosses, look, I'm gonna give up all my vacation if you just let me finish this movie, and at the end of that, I had a lawyer named Jeff Jacobs in Chicago who said, you never want to be in a position again where you have to sacrifice what you really wanted to do in order to give up what you really wanted to do, so in order to do that, you need to own yourself so that you're not getting a paid salary. You have a chance for syndication, but it means you've got to take a chance on yourself. It means you've got to believe that the show is gonna go beyond Chicago. Do you believe you can do that? And I was like, I know the show can go beyond Chicago, because I saw Chicago. I'm looking in the faces of the audience every day, and I could see that what we're talking about, what we're saying, what we're sharing, I mean, women in Memphis, and women in Maine, and women in Idaho, I could feel that this thing that's happening in this room with those women that were coming to the show was national or international, and so I took a chance on myself. But you could have argued, oh, I want a national triple my salary, but you didn't want it. No, I didn't want that. I wanted to bet on myself, and let me tell you this, the best thing in the world for me as a black woman has been being underestimated, because let me tell you, those white guys, those King World boys, they would have never given me 50% if they believed that I would be where I am today. They would have never given it. So I went from 50%, by the end of the show, I was 92%, okay? 92%. So that is what did it. The shift was believing enough in myself to not feel like I need to take a salary anymore, but I was actually willing to take the risk. And so I just want to finish up with this, because I know everybody here is interested in using yourself in service, and my thing is, if you're not going to work on changing the mentality, or work on something that allows the support for kids who've been traumatized, or people who've gone through challenging environments, that just writing checks doesn't do it. That's been my big lesson. We're at this, this is what's fun about this year, we have this historical moment, this 250th moment, we're only gonna do this once, we'll do it again in 50 years, hopefully we're all still around. What do you, when you think about your legacy, and again, you got a lot of a lot of living still to do, but this is one of those moments in time where we could think about, you know, what am I most proud of, or what I want people to think about, and everybody here has, you know, big things going on in their lives. But the greatest lesson about legacy, I actually learned from my friend Maya Angelo. When I finished opening my school in South Africa, I went to Maya's house because she wasn't able to go, she had the flu, and I always said, Maya, you can't believe this is the most extraordinary thing, this school is going to be my greatest legacy. And Maya, in her wisdom, said to me, you have no idea what your legacy will be. And I said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm telling you the girls, and Nelson Mandela was there, and it's just, these girls are gonna carry on, and she goes, I said, you have no idea. And she put the dough down, she was making these biscuits, and she put the dough down, and she said, you have no idea what your legacy is gonna be, because your legacy is not one thing, and it's certainly not your name on a building, and it's certainly not about the checks you wrote. Your legacy is actually every life you have touched. It's everybody who ever watched a show and made the decision to go back to school. It's everybody who said, you know what, I watched that show, and I'm in an abusive relationship, I'm not gonna allow myself to be abused anymore, I'm not gonna allow my kids to be abused anymore. It's the woman who followed you in the grocery store, me personally in the grocery store, Maya said, and said to you, you know, I used to beat my kids, but I don't beat my kids anymore, because I saw a show you did about not hitting your kids, and I didn't think I could live like that. So your legacy, although we're all legacy building and everything you're doing and will give and give to your children and family and foundations and stuff, that's a great thing, but how you live and how you're treating everybody on a daily basis, that is how you will be remembered. Because the other most powerful thing that Maya has said, I'm sure you all have heard this, is that people may forget what you have said, and they may forget what you did, but they never forget how you make them feel. So use your life to make people feel good, to make people feel that they matter. Use your life, use your business, use your philanthropy, use the light that is your life that has been given to you. Use that to lift somebody else up and give them just a little piece of what you have been able to receive. That's what I want to do. We, we, you gave us a gift by making us feel really good, but we want to give you one gift. There are 250 people, yes, so there, thank you, so we have 250 on the list, but again, there can only be number one, and that is that you always have that as our 250 icon, so thank you, thank you, thank you very much, thank you, a good surprise, what do you think? Thanks for the good company, thank you.