Dear Vania:
You can be hugely successful in your career and in life; all you need is to believe in yourself, and take your talent and tenacity to follow a game plan for life… just like Oprah Winfrey, the self made billionaire media queen.
You are young, talented, and have the tenacity to accomplish whatever you choose− all you need is a little help and some mentoring.
Read about Oprah Winfrey and follow her as your role model to accomplish success among the 54 million Hispanics living in the United States… just the way Oprah did it− building a media empire− starting with the 45 million African Americans in the United States.
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her multi-award-winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Turing point in Winfrey’s life came when she met and briefly dated movie critic Roger Ebert, whom she credits with advising her to take her show into syndication. Roger Ebert persuaded her to sign a syndication deal with King World. Ebert predicted that she would generate 40-times as much revenue as his own television show, At the Movies. It was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, expanded to a full hour, and broadcast nationally beginning September 8, 1986.
Oprah Winfrey is one of only seven self-made female billionaires and made her fortune without an inheritance.
Of those seven, four partnered with their (late) husbands. Winfrey is one of just three who built her fortune without the help of a man. The media queen is also the only African-American among the 400 wealthiest people in the country.
Her net worth is up $200 million from this time last year, to $2.9 billion. While she appears to have reversed the fortunes of her once-struggling network OWN, which became cash-flow positive in 2013, the bulk of her entertainment earnings still come from both her long-running talk show (off the air but in syndication) and the successful spin-off stars she helped create, including Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray and Dr. Oz. She also makes millions annually from her O Magazine and Sirius XM Oprah Radio show.
She’s also a significant real estate investor, with a mixed bag of properties from parcels of land in Maui to high-end apartments in Chicago and New York to her main residence, a 45-acre estate in Montecito, Calif., known as The Promised Land and worth upwards of $87 million.
As her fortune grows, Winfrey continues to give her money away, mostly supporting educational causes like the $100 million Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.
Think outside the box and think big… however, back-it-up with talent, tenacity, and hard work with a goal and focus. Even if you accomplish one hundredth of what Oprah Winfrey accomplished in her 27 years, you will be hugely successful.
Best wishes for your success.
[Curated content based on excerpts from posts, blogs, media articles, and sponsored research]