NEW STIMULUS MATERIAL

Oprah Winfrey’s Success Story:

Becoming an Inspiration to
Everyone
Mike Allton September 4, 2019

You’re no doubt aware of the incredible level of success that Oprah Winfrey has achieved. Beyond
wealth and accolades, Oprah Winfrey’s success story has shattered ceilings and inspired millions of
people around the world.

And yet, many have no idea the depths of poverty she rose from.
In the You Got This – Overcoming Solopreneur Fears series, we’re going to explore how many
of the most famous entrepreneurs and solopreneurs got their start in life and built
successful online businesses. We’ll learn what fears and obstacles they overcame to achieve
success, and look for lessons that we can take from their experiences!

Overcoming Adversity: The Oprah Winfrey Success Story

Oprah Winfrey was born in in 1954 in rural Mississippi, and could hardly have entered the world
in poorer conditions.
She spent her formative years going back and forth between her mother, her grandmother, her
father, and back, always struggling with her circumstances.
Being a poor, black girl in America in the 1960s was hardly a recipe for mind-blowing success.
Yet, succeed she did.
From an early age, Oprah showed tremendous strength of personality. Her grandmother often
recalled how naturally Oprah took to the stage and performed – whether she was actually on a
stage or not.
It was this rich personality that led her to join and excel at television broadcasting.

What Motivated Oprah to Become Successful?

In 1971, while she was still in high school, Oprah’s style and emotional delivery won her the
attention of and a position with a radio station in Nashville. After transitioning to TV in
Nashville and later Baltimore, she eventually moved to Chicago in 1983 to host the low-rated
morning show, AM Chicago.
With top-ratings, Oprah Winfrey overtook Donahue as the top-rated talk show in Chicago. After
a few years, the show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show and went on to air for 25 years.
Oprah’s unique style resulted in an entirely new form of communication on television – that of a
more intimate confessional, despite being on national tv. Her total empathy with guests – often to
the point of tears – created an environment where they felt more willing to share personal stories.
She popularized and revolutionized what’s referred to as “tabloid talk shows.” Newsday‘s Les
Payne wrote, “Oprah Winfrey is sharper than Donahue, wittier, more genuine, and far better
attuned to her audience, if not the world.”

Why is Oprah Winfrey important?

How did she do all of that, and more?
By not believing what she was told.
While being poor, black, and female in rural Mississippi may have been facts of her early life,
Oprah did not believe that those labels were the sum total of her existence.
She did not believe that she was limited by those labels.
She did not believe the people in her life who were telling her that she would never amount to
anything because of those labels.
Oprah could have easily let those whispers become the story that she told herself, but she chose
differently. She faced her fears and challenges and believed in herself.
Our stories… they’re powerful, aren’t they?
What stories are you telling yourself, right now?
Are you listening to people around you who say that you can’t do it? You can’t possibly build a
business online. There’s no way you can make enough money doing that. That’s impossible.
Or, are you listening to the kind of person who supports and encourages you?
Oprah’s grandmother is a great example of such a person. She saw early on that Oprah had a
passion and skill for public speaking and encouraged it.
But more importantly than that, Oprah’s grandmother supported that young woman so
thoroughly that she helped cultivate a positive sense of self-worth.
She believed in Oprah, which allowed Oprah to believe in herself.

Overcome Fears & Self Doubt

While we may not share Oprah’s original challenges, we can all relate to the fear of not being
good enough.
Whether it’s starting a new business, figuring out how to promote your website, publishing a
new blog post, getting into affiliate marketing, or standing up in front of a crowd of people, we
can give into the fear that we won’t be accepted, we’ll be humiliated, and we’ll become
notorious failure stories.
We can tell ourselves that it’s a terrible idea, it will never work, and that we need to save
ourselves from the pain and embarrassment the idea represents.
Or, we can tell ourselves that’s just a story, and it doesn’t have to be our story.
We can, and should, resist those fears and self-doubts.
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his
attitude – Oprah Winfrey
One of the reasons we look to famous solopreneurs and entrepreneurs (other than the simple fact
that their stories are easily accessible) is to look at people who came from the same places we
came from, had the same fears that we’ve had, and yet were able to overcome and succeed.
It’s inspiring and reassuring to learn their stories and to use that knowledge to solidify the story
we want to believe for and of ourselves.

Everyday People Doing Extraordinary Things…

Travis Wilkerson grew up American poor, in a house without running water or a bathroom. He
was taught that all rich people are evil and greedy.
In his early twenties he met his first mentor who showed him how to raise himself out of poverty
through investing… without doing evil.
Travis was hooked. He was so excited, he talked about it all day… to his wife. She,
unfortunately, did not share his love for investing. She did, though, make one suggestion that
changed Travis’s life forever.
Read how, like Oprah and Travis you can overcome adversity to become a successful
solopreneur.

Author: Mike Allton

Mike is a Content Marketing Practitioner, award-winning Blogger and Author in St. Louis, and the Chief Marketing
Officer at SiteSell. He has been working with websites and the Internet since the early '90's, and is active on all of the
major social networks. Mike teaches a holistic approach… View full profile ›

THE OFFICIAL STIMULUS

Link: How Oprah Winfrey Overcame Failure (thejobnetwork.com)
Professional Development

How Oprah Winfrey Overcame Failure

by Peter Jones
Imagine being born in rural 1950s Mississippi to an impoverished teenage mother. Imagine
suffering abuse from the age of 9, then running away from home at 13, only to become pregnant
at 14 and lose your first child. Now imagine you’re Oprah.

Sound implausible? It’s true. Oprah was able to turn the tables on this disastrous upbringing, but
it took guts and grit. She moved to Tennessee to live with her father and began to excel in
school. She did well in speech and debate. She even won a state beauty pageant. All while
working part-time reading news for a local radio station until she could earn a scholarship to
college at Tennessee State.

In college, this wounded girl became a powerhouse of a woman. She majored in communications
and landed her first post-graduation job at a Nashville station. That turned into a bigger gig with
an ABC affiliate in Baltimore. Soon after that, she was hired as a primetime news co-anchor, an
incredible feat considering she was a young, black woman in an era where old, white men made
and enforced all the rules.

There was a publicity campaign before her debut. The network wanted to broaden their
viewership. Suddenly, Oprah Winfrey was thrust into the spotlight with high expectations. She
was set up for failure. When the show failed, she was blamed—and not her old, white, male co-
host. She was demoted to a writing and reporting gig but was a slow writer and too caring for the
kind of hard-nosed reporting required. (On one notable occasion, she was so moved by the plight
of a family who had lost their things in a fire, that she donated some of her blankets and supplies
to them, drawing flack from her boss.)

Even Oprah herself looks back on these years as a failure. But she did not give up. Instead, she
took stock of the situation, realized that, while she loved television, she preferred human interest
stories to hard news. And while she loved hosting, she had to have significant chemistry with a
co-host to make that relationship worthwhile.

Eventually, all this soul-searching paid off. She took a job co-hosting a show called People are
Talking with Richard Sher. To anyone else, this would have been considered a step down. But
Oprah made lemonade. The show was successful enough to run for five years, after which Oprah
was recruited to host a morning talk show in Chicago. That show became a household name.
And Oprah became an international sensation.
What Oprah had was a unique combination of empathy, determination, and the ability to keep
moving forward when all else had fallen apart. Her ability to excel in business while not being
business-oriented is a marvel. Moral of the story? Have passion, believe in your dreams, believe
in yourself even when no one else does, and keep going when hope is lost. Don’t be afraid to fail.

STIMULUS 2
https://images.app.goo.gl/Gi3qtEYmh2cNapA48
Type: Poem
Poet: Joshua Harris
Title: Do Not Go Gentle
STIMULUS 3
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%2F45xHIG
Type: Song; Champion
Artist: Carrie Underwood
Date of publication: March 2, 2008