Oprah Winfrey Reveals the Only Regret She Has in Life

During an interview with Al Roker done in honor of his 70th birthday, Winfrey, who is also 70, spoke to the Today show weatherman about the one decision she made that she still regrets to this day.

It was a business decision that dates back to 2011, when Oprah was ending her run hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show. Simultaneously, Winfrey was working to kick-start her own network, the OWN channel.

So what was the regret? When asked if she would do anything differently during that pivotal time in her life, the media mogul responded, “I would not have taken on the responsibility of trying to build a network [OWN] while still ending the show. That is my one regret. I should have handled all of that differently, I think.”

She continued, “I should have completed one thing, taken a year to do nothing, and then decided what was the next thing for me to do.”

As for as the show ending when it did, Winfrey said she has no regrets about that.

“I’d made a decision that it was time for the show to end, I don’t regret that. What I do regret is trying to do multiple things at the same time,” she maintained. “I would have done the thing that I tell everybody else to do: ‘When you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Get still with yourself and do nothing.’ I would have given myself that time.”

Winfrey added, “Everybody has that natural life force instinct inside yourself that lets you know what’s right or wrong, or that is your emotional GPS system, and any time I’ve ever gone against that, any time, is when I’ve made a mistake. Every time I’ve just gotten still and listened to what my gut said — what that still small voice that resides inside me and you and everybody else says — I would never have made a mistake.”

These days, Winfrey values her downtime more than ever. And it’s the simple things that bring her the most joy.

“If it’s a rainy day, I’m in love with life. You know why? No expectations,” she said. “Nobody expects you to go out on a rainy day. If it’s bright sun everybody’s like, ‘Come on, let’s do that that that.’ I love myself a rainy day. Rainy day, a fireplace, a blanket, and a dog at your foot and a great book? That’s it. That’s it for me.”

While Winfrey’s show ran from 1986 until 2011, the OWN Network is still up and running, featuring shows like the Love & Marriage franchise, Queen Sugar and Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday series.

When Roker asked if she thought she would be the same person if her show had begun now rather than in 1986, Winfrey replied with a swift “no,” telling the longtime Today show staple that the show both shaped her as a person and the media landscape as a whole.

“It was a different time. I often think about this just even in terms of The Oprah Show and the immense range of subjects that we covered on a daily basis. We were just talking about what was going on in people’s lives in a real and meaningful way,” Winfrey recalled. “Raising children, overcoming cancer, stepping away from abuse. Every single imaginable dysfunction in our culture, that Oprah Winfrey Show was able to address in a way that allowed people to see the best of themselves and the possibility of what could be.”

She continued, “I was just speaking in Grand Rapids and someone said, ‘You changed my life because you allowed me to see what I could be versus what I thought I had to be,’ which is really a great testimony for what a television platform could do.”