Meghan Markle has shared lighthearted insights about her “over-achieving” nature while joking about her A positive blood type.

During a chat with a friend on her podcast, the Duchess of Sussex got candid about her business success and the advice Oprah Winfrey gave her.

Meghan Markle kicked off 2025 by rejoining Instagram, and she has since launched several new projects, including her lifestyle brand, As Ever, and a Netflix show.

On the latest episode of her Confessions of a Female Founder podcast with longtime friend and businesswoman Jamie Kern Lima, Meghan shared a lighthearted moment about her personality, joking that her A positive blood type might explain her drive to overachieve.

In their friendly exchange, Meghan quipped, “I feel like we haven’t talked about our blood type. But yours is probably an A positive like mine because I was like ‘Even my blood is over-achieving.'”

During the episode, Meghan also touched on her connection with Oprah Winfrey, whom she described as both a mentor and a friend.

The duchess shared that Winfrey offered her a pivotal piece of advice while she was preparing to launch her lifestyle brand, As Ever.

According to Meghan, Winfrey encouraged her to dig deep and align the brand with her true self.

“There are tons of things you can put your name on, but for you and how you like to show up for people, once you figure out how to encapsulate your essence, then you’ll know,” Meghan recalled, per the Daily Mail.

Shifting the focus to her entrepreneurial journey, Meghan discussed how her lifestyle brand, As Ever, began with a simple love for making jam.

“At the beginning, I just liked making jam. All I liked to do was just make jam and preserves,” Meghan said on her podcast. “And it went from, ‘Okay, I’m gonna share this jam with lots of friends and family,’ to ‘People really like it and it brings me joy. So maybe I can share it more broadly.'”

Encouraged by their reactions, Meghan considered selling them more widely but admitted she initially limited her vision out of fear.

She said, “I was in so much fear of failure or opinion, that I wasn’t thinking big enough at first – at the onset, I thought, ‘Okay, I know what I can do, I’m going to go online, I can get what’s called a ‘Cottage Licence,’ which you can get in the State of California, which means if you cook something in your home you can sell it up to a certain amount at a farmers’ market or somewhere small.”

Meghan continued, “And I thought, ‘Okay, well that’s great, I’ll get my Cottage Licence, and I applied for one. And I just thought ‘I’ll just do a small batch jam from home.’ And I had to step back and look at what I was doing and saying, ‘Am I playing small because I want to play small? Or am I setting in motion playing small because I’m scared?”

Meghan spoke about a conversation with Lima that helped shape the launch of As Ever.

She recalled seeking advice from her friend early in the process, saying: “For me, starting a company, it’s newer, [I am] surrounded by very savvy business women friends. You and I had just become friends, and I was talking to you about business.”

Meghan continued: “I remember you said to me, ‘Okay, so what’s the timeline?’ I said, ‘Oh, a couple months from now.’ You said, ‘That’s too soon.’ And I didn’t want to hear that, but you’re right.”

That moment, Meghan noted, allowed her to slow down and resist external pressure.

“You planted a seed that became a knowing for me, and it gave me the grace to have the space to take my time until it was right,” she explained. “To really not be concerned about someone else’s urgency, or the media’s urgency, or speculation’s urgency, somehow becoming my urgency – to wait until you’re ready. Even if I didn’t want to hear it, it was the thing that I needed to hear.”

During Meghan and Lima’s chat on the podcast, Lima noted how easy it is for a person to feel like they are behind when comparing themselves to others online.

“If all of a sudden our timelines are being pushed out or something, we think we did something wrong. We think, ‘Oh, everyone else sure looks like they have it together on social media or whatever, it must just be me,” Lima stated.

She added: “Because a lot of times when you look at companies or you look at businesses or anything online, you know, you see the outcome or the external.”

Meghan then added that the polished success stories people often see can be misleading.

She explained: “They create the illusion of – here’s the finished product and look at how great it is. It’s just tied up with a bow, and the bow is perfect as opposed to the process is not perfect.”

The duchess emphasized that the behind-the-scenes journey is often messy and emotionally taxing.

“The process can be painful, and it can be riddled with things that don’t just make you question your business, they make you question yourself,” Meghan shared.

The Duchess of Sussex began the year by returning to Instagram and shortly after announcing the release of her Netflix series, “With Love, Meghan.”

The cookery show was followed by the launch of her lifestyle brand, As Ever, after which she debuted her new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder.

With all these projects running simultaneously, Meghan has had a very busy year, which she alluded to during her speech at the recently held TIME100 summit in New York City.

“There were three projects that we were launching really at the same time. The past year-and-a-half have been incredibly busy and ambitious,” Meghan said, per the Daily Mail.

She added, “Then you see it all come to life and try to give yourself the space and the grace to make mistakes, to know you’re not doing it right every day.”