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My Favorite Entrepreneur Essay My favorite entrepreneur: Ms. Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey was born into poverty by a teenage single mother in 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. For the earliest years of her life she was raised by her maternal grandmother, and under her kind-hearted discipline was taught to read by the age of two and speak exceptionally by the age of three. When Winfrey was six years old, she was sent to live with her mother in Wisconsin. She was submerged into inner-city Milwaukee, and faced the hardships of growing up in the urban ghetto. Her mother had many problems of her own and was so consumed by them that she was unable to give attention to her daughter. This had many adverse consequences, and left Winfrey vulnerable to multiple counts of sexual abuse at an early age, including by her mothers boyfriend, a teenage cousin, and a family friend. She also became pregnant at the age of 14, but her son died at infancy. As she got older, she struggled with racism and was discriminated against by her peers because of her economic status. The neglect and problems she encountered led Winfrey to develop an aggressive attitude, and eventually her mother could no longer deal with Winfreys delinquency and so she sent her to live with her father in Nashville, Tennessee. With his strict disciplinary mechanisms and value for education, Winfreys father helped her turn her life around. She became an honor student and at the age of 17 began her broadcasting career on the radio station WVOL. She earned a scholarship to Tennessee State University and studied drama and speech. At the age of 19 she landed an anchor position for WTVF-TV, Nashvilles CBS affiliate. Here she was the first African-American and the youngest person to ever be an anchor on the network. Not too late afterwards in 1976 she moved to Boston to take on a position as co-anchor for WJZ-TV evening news. However, it was hard for her to contain her emotions on many of her stories, and her attachment to the subject matter made her a poor fit for the position. She was fired for these reasons. Nevertheless, a manager at the network saw her ability to connect closely with the subjects and her excellent communication skills and found a position more suited towards her as a co-host on talk show People Are Talking. The show’s ratings soared, and Winfreys success attracted attention in the Midwest where she was offered a position as anchor on AM Chicago. It almost instantly became the #1 local talk show and within a year was renamed the Oprah Winfrey Show. The show was soon picked up in 120 cities and became the nation’s top talk show. However, Winfrey did not like the idea of working for someone else, and in 1986 she founded Harpo, Inc. and took on the Oprah Winfrey Show by 1988 in her own studio in Chicago. The third woman in history to own and produce her own show, as well as the first African-American to own her own entertainment production company, Winfrey was capitalizing success. The early years of the program was classified as a tabloid talk show, however as years went on Winfrey adopted broader topics such as disease, spirituality, substance abuse, geopolitics, domestic topics, celebrity interviews, and philanthropy. She herself has become one of our worlds most noted philanthropists and also hosts televised giveaways. In addition to her talk show, Winfrey acted and voiced-over in different movies and TV shows, as well as ones she produced herself like The Women of Brewster Place and Brewster Place. Furthermore, Winfrey has co-authored five books and publishes O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home, which was dubbed the most successful start-up ever in the industry by Fortune in 2002. She also created her website Oprah. com, one of the top womens lifestyles websites, as well as Oprah’s Book Club, the largest book club in the world. Winfrey went on to co-found womens cable television network Oxygen. In January, 2011, Discovery Health Channel was changed into a new channel called OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. Winfrey, for many years now, has been viewed as the most powerful woman in the entertainment industry, and even beyond the entertainment industry. The Wall Street Journal coined the term Oprahfication meaning therapy through public confession, and there have been numerous incidents of the Oprah effect where her public opinions influence consumer choices. She has been invited onto the corporate boards of ATamp;T, Ralph Lauren, and Intel, all of which she turned down. Winfrey holds a fairly private personal and business life, as all her employees are sworn to keep things private for the remaining of their lives, and she holds full control in all her distribution deals with ABC, Oxygen Network, and Hearst Magazines. She also holds 90% of Harpos stock. By the age of 41, Winfrey had a net worth of $340 million and replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. She has remained the only African American to rank among Americas 400 richest people nearly every year since 1995, and is the ichest African American of the 20th century. From 2004 to 2006 Winfrey was the worlds only black billionaire and the first black woman billionaire in world history. In 2010 she took on the title of the richest self-made woman in America. Her 2011 salary was $290 million and she had a set worth of $2. 7 billion. Throughout this all, Winfrey is lives her life by two principles: live a great life for yourself and make a difference in the world. These ha ve been motivating factors for Winfrey too overcome the different struggles in her life and pull forward to a positive outcome. Her intellectual and emotional qualities paved the way for her to really connect with diverse people of difference backgrounds, values, and experiences, and to open up all sorts of subject matter in a some-how comfortable setting although very public. Her public speaking and proficient communication abilities allowed her to emerge as such a strong candidate in the industry. Even with that, Winfrey is a woman of self-improvement and took improv classes at Chicagos own Second City to work on her presence and wit in high pressure situations like on talk shows and live television. But her success isnt all in her broadcasting or talk shows. In fact, Winfrey says her success began as a third grader when she turned her book report in early. She stands by the ideas to always go the extra mile, and that we are all entitled to success. Let excellence be your brand, Winfrey says at a 2012 speech to Spellman College graduates. Winfrey is a strong believer in doing the right thing, and she guarantees that doing right will only allow for right to come back to you and carry you on your way to success. Another point Winfrey strongly upholds is finding a way to serve. She says that she doesnt serve TV she serves the world through TV, and that is what each of us should do as we find our niches to use our success as a way to serve. Furthermore, Winfrey believes it is key to know who you are and to take charge of your life. Making decisions for one’s self and pursuing goals is absolutely critical if one wants to find success. Winfrey was able to use these ideals, lessons from her life, and her true passions and talents to go from rags to riches, to become the Queen of talk shows, and a historical success legend.