WHAT HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE WERE DOING AT AGE 25
Everyone's
measure of and path to success is different.
For
some, it's mostly linear. Others encounter more twists, turns, and bumps along
the way.
Before
becoming the leader of the free world, Donald Trump, was born into a real-estate
development family and inherited his father's business at 25.
Kat
Cole, the group president of Focus Brands group, on the other hand, saw her 20s
as more transformative years, working her way up the ladder from a Hooters
waitress to the company's vice president by the time she was 26.
To
illustrate how no two paths to success are alike, we've highlighted what 25
highly successful people were doing at age 25.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had a cushy job in
finance.
At
24, the future Amazon founder and CEO went to work at Bankers Trust developing
revolutionary software for banking institutions at that time, according to
"Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com" by Ann Byers.
Two
years later, he became the company's youngest vice president.
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs took his company public and became a
millionaire.
By the end of
its first day of trading, in December 1980, Apple Computer had a market value
of $1.2 billion, making its cofounders rich men. Jobs, one of the three
cofounders, was 25.
He later
told biographer Walter Isaacson that he made a pledge at that time to never let
money ruin his life.
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users.
Zuckerberg had been hard at work on Facebook
for five years by the time he turned 25. In that year — 2009 — the company
turned cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users. He was
excited at the time, but said it was just the start, writing on Facebook that
"the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our
goal of connecting everyone."
The next
year, he was named Person of the Year by Time magazine.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison was working odd jobs as a programmer.
After
moving to Berkeley, California, at 22, the college dropout turned billionaire
Oracle founder used what he picked up in college and taught himself about
computer programming. He found odd technical jobs at places
like
Fireman's Fund, Wells Fargo, and AMPEX until finally landing at Amdahl Corp.,
where he worked on the first IBM-compatible mainframe system.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had met mentor Larry Summers and was getting a
Harvard MBA.
At age 25, Sandberg had graduated at the top of
the economics department from Harvard, worked at the World Bank under her
former professor, mentor, and future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and had
gone back to Harvard to get her MBA, which she received in 1995.
She went on
to work at McKinsey, and at age 29 was Summers' chief of staff when he became
Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary.
Her time at
HBS was a ways before Google, but that experience helped her see the potential
of the internet, she said in a commencement speech to HBS grads in 2012:
"It
wasn't really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has
changed an awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS's first online
class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial up service (your parents can
explain). We had to pass out a list of screen names, because it was unthinkable
to put your real name on the internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing …
the world wasn't set up for 90 people to communicate at once online. But for a
few brief moments though, we glimpsed the future, a future where technology
would power who we are and connect us to our real colleagues, our real family,
our real friends."
Author J.K. Rowling came up with the idea for the 'Harry Potter' series on a train.
Rowling was 25 when she came up with the idea
for "Harry Potter" during a delayed four-hour train ride in 1990.
She started
writing the first book that evening, but it took her years to finish it. While
working as a secretary for the London office of Amnesty International, Rowling
was fired for daydreaming too much about "Harry Potter," and her
severance check would help her focus on writing for the next few years.
During these
years, she got married, had a daughter, got divorced, and was diagnosed with
clinical depression before finally finishing the book in 1995. It was published
in 1997.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk was running his first internet company.
Before turning 25, Musk dropped out of his PhD
program at Stanford to join the dot-com boom and launch his first internet
company, Zip2, which provided business directories and maps, Ashlee Vance
reports in "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic
Future."
Compaq
bought the company for $307 million four years later, and Musk used the money
to launch his next startup venture, PayPal.
Xerox Chairwoman Ursula Burns started out as an intern, but worked her way up at Xerox throughout her 20s.
Burns overcame a tough upbringing in a New York
City housing project to get a degree in mechanical engineering from the
Polytechnic Institute of NYU and then a master's from Columbia University.
Since then
she's been a Xerox lifer. She started as an intern at age 22 in 1980 and joined
full time a year later after getting her master's. She rose rapidly through the
ranks, working in various product development roles until she was named CEO in
2009. She now serves as the chairwoman of the board at Xerox.
"When I
came to work at Xerox, I just chose to work. Somebody said 'how about this?'
And I said OK, and I would go do that in the lab," Burns said in an
interview for the PBS documentary "Makers." "Then somebody said
how about doing some business planning. Then I started leaning more towards
larger global systems problems. And systems problems are the business."
Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz was a Xerox salesman.
After graduating from Northern Michigan
University, Schultz worked as a salesman for Xerox. His success there led a
Swedish company named Hammerplast that made coffeemakers to recruit him at age
26.
While
working for that company, he encountered the first Starbucks outlets in
Seattle, and went on to join the company at age 29.
On his job
at Xerox, Schultz writes in "Pour Your Heart Into It":
"I
learned more there than in college about the worlds of work and business. They
trained me in sales, marketing, and presentation skills, and I walked out with
a healthy sense of self-esteem. Xerox was a blue-chip pedigree company, and I
got a lot of respect when I told others who my employer was ... But I can't say
I ever developed a passion for word processors."
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was building a deep background in computer science.
Schmidt spent six years as a graduate student
at UC Berkeley, earning a master's and Ph.D. by age 27 for his early work in
networking computers and managing distributed software development.
He spent
those summers working at the famed Xerox PARC labs, which helped create the
computer workstation as we know it. There, he met the founder of Sun
Microsystems, where he had his first corporate job.
In his early
years as a programmer, "all of us never slept at night because computers
were faster at night."
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