Your PATH to Success

Editor's Notes

• #4: Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana to Owen and Minerva Breedlove. She was one of six children; she had a sister Louvenia and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen, Jr. Her parents and elder siblings were slaves on Madison Parish plantation owned by Robert W. Burney . [1] She was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died, possibly from cholera , in 1872. Her father remarried and died shortly afterward. [2] Madam C. J. Walker moved in with her older sister and brother-in-law, Willie Powell. At the age of 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape Powell's mistreatment and three years later her daughter, Lelia McWilliams (A'Lelia Walker) was born. When Sarah was 20, her husband died, and Lelia was just 2 years old. Shortly afterward she moved to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived; her brothers were all barbers at a local barbershop. In 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman. Like many women of her era, Sarah experienced hair loss. Because most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, they bathed and washed their hair infrequently. The result was scalp disease. Sarah experimented with home remedies and products already on the market until she finally developed her own shampoo and an ointment that contained sulfur to make her scalp healthier for hair growth. Sarah, now known as Madam C. J. Walker, was selling her products throughout the United States. While her daughter Lelia (later known as A'Lelia Walker) ran a mail order business from Denver , Madam Walker and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern states. They settled in Pittsburgh in 1908 and opened Lelia College to train "hair culturists." In 1910 Walker moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where she established her headquarters and built a factory. She began to teach and train other black women in order to help them build their own businesses. She also gave other lectures on political, economic and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. After the East St. Louis Race Riot , she joined leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their efforts to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime. In 1918 at the biennial convention of the National Association Of Colored Woman (NACW) she was acknowledged for making the largest contribution to save the Anacostia (Washington, DC) house of abolitionist Frederick Douglass . She continued to donate money throughout her career the NAACP, the YMCA , and to black schools, organizations, individuals, orphanages, and retirement homes.
• #5: Jack Dorsey A self-defined loner who dreams. The intellectual successor to Steve Jobs Twitter Square Square Wallet New York Mayor Created Twitter in 2006 200 million people sending over a billion tweets every three days Weaknesses – can be silent, over think things; needs to be more vocal Dorsey forced out of Twitter – like Jobs was forced out of Apple Two and a half years later invited back While on leave from Twitter – created Square Twitter is about messages Square is about money – his friend is an artist and couldn’t sell a piece of art so he was frustrated – ask Jack to help him Fast and easy – two ingredients of his software Started 30 years ago Speech impediment spent time alone beginning at 8 to build computers Fascinated with trains and train yards in st. Louis. And maps Studying trains with life long obsession Jack intrigued coming out of St. Louis emergency dispatch center he listened to personnel – short bursts of communication which was inspiration for twitter – where they are going – where they currently are – what they are doing As a teenager created software allowing ER personnel to track each other Hacked into a New York City dispatch company and told them how to fix their security hole on their web site at 19
• #6: French writer Anatole France (1844-1924) wrote, "To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." Charles Kemmons Wilson proved on more than one occasion that dreams not only helped him accomplish goals but were necessary for his life.   His father was an insurance salesman who died when Kemmons was nine months old leaving his 18 year old mother to care for him. Shortly thereafter, his mother, Doll, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she raised him. They had little money and often struggled for even the most basic necessities.   At fourteen years of age Wilson was hit by a car and told he would never walk again. With his mother's support he spent a year in therapy and was eventually able to walk. When Doll lost her job in the great depression Wilson dropped out of high school, against her wishes, and had a dream to succeed in life and never be poor again.   He borrowed $50 from a friend to buy a popcorn machine in a local theater. But the manager fired him for making more money than he did. But the girl he hired to sell popcorn, Dorothy Lee, became his wife of 59 years. From popcorn, he switched to the pinball machine business and used his first profits to pay for a house for his mother. He built the house, saving $1,700, by doing the work himself. He then mortgaged his house to buy a jukebox business and also started a successful home building business upon returning from serving in World War II.   In August 1951 the Wilson family took a vacation and traveled from Tennessee to Washington. Along the way they needed to stop and sleep in various inns. Wilson, a millionaire at this point in his life, was appalled at the squalor of many guest accommodations, but his anger was piqued by having to pay $2 extra for each of his five children.   He told his wife that he had a dream to start a hotel chain, one that did not charge extra for children, had clean and affordable rooms and offered the newly popular television and other amenities like a swimming pool and food. Plenty of people doubted his dream since there wasn't anything close to such a concept at that time.   On August 1, 1952 Wilson witnessed his second dream come true when he opened his first Holiday Inn at 4895 Summers Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee between a lumberyard and a two-lane highway.   In 1957, Wilson expanded his dream when he franchised the chain as Holiday Inn of America and watched it grow dramatically. By 1959, there were 100 locations across the country and 500 by 1964. Kemmons dream is still alive today as there are over 1,500 Holiday Inns around the world.
• #7: "Claim ownership of your dreams. Who you going to call? The cavalry is not coming" Chris Gardner   Chris Gardner was a salesman who struggled to sell equipment that he had purchased with the intention of selling. His wife left him and he subsequently competed for and worked a 6-month unpaid internship at Dean Witter so he could become a stockbroker and make a better life for him and his son.  During this period, he did not earn an income and lived on the streets with minimal support. The well-received movie version of his book, The Pursuit of Happyness, exposed millions of people to Chris' story. His drive and determination helped him to create a new set of circumstances for himself when it might have been easier for him to just give in to the circumstances that life had given him. His choice was to change the circumstances, not merely react to them.
• #8: Fashion designer Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel (1883-1971) said, "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different. People laughed at the way I dressed, but that was the secret of my success: I didn't look like anyone."   Chanel teaches us the importance of being different from others.   Chanel was born on August 20, 1883 as one of five children to an unmarried couple. Her mother died when she was twelve years old and a week later her father placed her in an orphanage where nuns raised her.   She adopted the name Coco during a brief career as a cafe and concert singer between 1905 and 1908. "First a mistress of a wealthy military officer then of an English industrialist, Coco Chanel drew on the resources of these patrons in setting up a millinery shop in Paris in 1910, expanding to Deauville and Biarritz." The two men also helped market her clothing and hats to women of society.   While women were used to wearing corset fashions, Chanel created a look that was casual and relaxed. Chanel herself dressed in men's clothing, and adapted these more comfortable fashions which other women also found liberating.   In 1922 Chanel introduced Chanel No. 5, which became one of the most popular perfumes. She also introduced her signature cardigan jacket in 1925 and signature "little black dress" in 1926. "Most of her fashions had a staying power, and didn't change much from year to year -- or even generation to generation."   During World War II, Coco Chanel briefly served as a nurse and the Nazi occupation of Paris meant that she had to close her fashion business for several years. During the war she had an affair with a Nazi officer and that resulted in some years of diminished popularity and an exile.   After the war ended she resumed making unique clothing and introduced the Chanel suit, pea jackets and bell bottom pants for women. She was still working in 1971 when she died.
• #10: "If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance." Orville and Wilbur Wright Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the world's first successful airplane.  They made the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on December 17, 1903. In the two years afterward, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft.  The Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible. The brothers' fundamental breakthrough was their invention of three-axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its equilibrium. This method became standard and remains standard on fixed-wing aircraft of all kinds.  From the beginning of their aeronautical work, the Wright brothers focused on unlocking the secrets of control to conquer "the flying problem" rather than developing more powerful engines as some other experimenters did.  
• #11: The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation is a nonprofit organization working to increase access to education in post-conflict South Sudan by building schools, libraries, teacher-training institutes, and community centers. Established by Valentino Deng and Dave Eggers after the publication of What Is the What , the Foundation's first major project is the construction and operation of an 18-structure educational complex in Valentino's hometown of Marial Bai, South Sudan. The Marial Bai Secondary School opened in May 2009, and is the first high school in the entire region. The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation is a nonprofit organization working to increase access to education in post-conflict South Sudan by building schools, libraries, teacher-training institutes, and community centers. Established by Valentino Deng and Dave Eggers after the publication of What Is the What , the Foundation's first major project is the construction and operation of an 18-structure educational complex in Valentino's hometown of Marial Bai, South Sudan. The Marial Bai Secondary School opened in May 2009, and is the first high school in the entire region. Fewer than one percent of girls go on to attend secondary school in South Sudan. The VAD Foundation is committed to changing this harrowing statistic. This past school year, 34 girls boarded at the Marial Bai Secondary School's all-female dormitories. At full capacity, the Marial Bai Secondary School will house more female students than any other secondary school in South Sudan.
• #13: Mario Renato Capecchi is an Italian-born American molecular geneticist and Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, which he joined in 1973.  His life story provides a variety of examples of how professional development is linked to personal growth.    Mario was born in the Italian city of Verona in 1937 as the only child of an abusive father (Luciano) and a caring mother (Lucy) who worked as a poet and antifascist campaigner.  Lucy refused to marry Mario's father. When Mario was around three years of age German officers arrested his mother and set her to a concentration camp leaving Mario to fend for himself.  For a time he lived with a family friend but when money ran out to support him, and he refused to live with his father, young Mario found himself a street orphan at the age of four and a half. Persevere difficult situations - Between the ages of four and a half and nine Mario wandered around the streets of wartime Italy.  As Tim Harford wrote in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure , "Mario survived on scraps, joined gangs and drifted in and out of orphanages and eventually had to be hospitalized for a year probably due to typhoid."  At nine years of age, after not seeing his mother for almost six years and being homeless for almost as long, Mario was reunited with her after she spent nearly 18 months looking for him. With the help of relatives in the U.S. both Mario and Lucy left for America soon after they were reunited. Believed he created his own life - With the support of a relatives and friends in Pennsylvania, Mario enrolled in school and eventually graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County. He then graduated from Antioch College in Ohio with a BS in chemistry and physics in 1961 when he was 24 years of age.  Mario enrolled at MIT's graduate program to study physics and mathematics but subsequently became interested in molecular biology and transferred to Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.  Capecchi received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967 under the tutelage of Watson.   From 1967 to 1973 Capecchi held various faculty positions at Harvard but grew increasingly alarmed at its results driven environment. Despite objections from Watson, who once quipped "Capecchi accomplished more as a graduate student than most scientists accomplish in a lift time and that he would be fucking crazy to pursue his studies anywhere other than in the cutting edge intellectual atmosphere of Harvard," Capecchi left Harvard to join a new department at the University of Utah. Capecchi believed that the short-term gratification environment at Harvard limited his ability to breathe if he was to do great work. Believe in yourself when others do not and taking calculated risks - During the 1980s Capecchi took another professional risk when he used money from two NIH grants to conduct research on a third grant that was denied funding.  Despite the odds of success and with his reputation on the line, Capecchi achieve a revolutionary breakthrough with his research involving a mouse's DNA. Eventually, Capacchi and two colleagues, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies created the first knockout mouse in 1989, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2007.  "As the NIH's expert panel had earlier admitted, when agreeing to renew his funding: 'We are glad you didn't follow our advice.'" 
• #14: Management consultant Peter Drucker wrote "Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes."   Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales launched a platform that allows people across the globe to collectively improve and increase knowledge.   Born in Huntsville, Alabama Wales received his bachelor's degree in finance then entered a Ph.D. program. Instead of writing the required dissertation, which he found boring, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates and "soon earned enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives."   During his college years he first learned of the potential of large scale online collaboration when he became familiar with a type of virtual role playing game called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). In 1996 he founded the web portal Bomis with two partners.   Although Bomis struggled to make money it did provide him with the funding he needed to pursue his idea for an online encyclopedia. In March 2000, along with Larry Sanger, Wales launched a peer-reviewed open-content encyclopedia called Nupedia. Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and attract enough viewers that would allow advertising to be placed alongside the entries.   Due to an arduous peer-review process, however, Nupedia failed to achieve a high rate of growth. To help facilitate its growth and simplify the submission process, Wales and Sanger implemented a new tool called a wiki that programmer Ben Kovitz introduced to them in January 2001.   When Nupedia's experts rejected the wiki for fear that mixing amateur content with professionally researched material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia's information and damage the credibility Wales and Sanger labeled the new project "Wikipedia" and went live on its own domain five days after its creation.   In its brief history Nupedia produced just 24 articles. As of January 1, 2012 Wikipedia currently offers 20 million articles (3.8 million in English alone) published in 282 languages and has 100,000 regularly active contributors  .
• #15: In 1962, Smith entered Yale University . While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age . Folklore suggests that he received a C for this paper, although in a later interview he claims that he told a reporter, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C", while other tales suggest that his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be feasible. The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale). Smith became a member and eventually the President of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the secret society Skull and Bones . [5][6] He received his Bachelor's degree in economics in 1966. In his college years, he was a friend and DKE fraternity brother of George W. Bush . [7] Smith was also friends with John Kerry and shared an enthusiasm for aviation with Kerry [8] and was a flying partner with him. After graduation, Smith joined in the U.S. Marine Corps , serving for three years, from 1966 to 1969, as a platoon leader and a forward air controller (FAC), flying in the back seat of the OV-10 . Much mythology exists about this part of his life; Smith was a Marine Corps "Ground Officer" for his entire service. He was specially trained to fly with pilots and observe and 'control' ground action. He never went through Navy flight training and was not a "Naval aviator" or "pilot" in the military. Individuals who completed Navy flight training and became a "Designated Naval Aviator" (pilot) were obligated to serve six years at the time. As a Marine, Smith had the opportunity to observe the military's logistics system first hand. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam , flying with pilots on over 200 combat missions. He was honorably discharged in 1969 with the rank of Captain, having received the Silver Star , the Bronze Star , and two Purple Hearts . While in the military, Smith carefully observed the procurement and delivery procedures, fine-tuning his dream for an overnight delivery service. [4] In 1970, Smith purchased the controlling interest in an aircraft maintenance company, Ark Aviation Sales, [4] and by 1971 turned its focus to trading used jets. On June 18, 1971, Smith founded Federal Express with his $4 million inheritance (about $21 million in 2008 dollars), [9] and raised $91 million (about $484 million in 2008 dollars) [9] in venture capital. In 1973, the company began offering service to 25 cities, and it began with small packages and documents and a fleet of 14 Falcon 20 (DA-20) jets. His focus was on developing an integrated air-ground system, which had never been done before. Smith developed FedEx on the business idea of a shipment version of a bank clearing house where one bank clearing house was located in the middle of the representative banks and all their representatives would be sent to the central location to exchange materials. [4]
• #16: Orfalea's father and grandmother ran clothing stores in Los Angeles. According to Orfalea, he was a woodshop major in high school, and his typical report card was "two C's, three D's, and an F." Due to his dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Orfalea reportedly flunked two grades and was expelled from several schools. [3] He later attended the University of Southern California. [1] Despite being fired from a number of jobs, his family supported him in his determination to launch his own business. [4] In later life he remarked on the subject of his handicaps, "I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator, I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D." [5][6] Kinko's Orfalea decided to start up his own business while he was attending USC. With a $5,000 bank loan co-signed by his parents, Orfalea founded Kinko's in 1970. His first store was a 100 square foot space adjacent to a hamburger stand in the Isla Vista neighborhood of Santa Barbara, California, rented for $100 a month. Orfalea began selling notebooks, pens, pencils, and the services of a copying machine at 4 cents per copy. Within ten years, Kinko’s grew to a network of over 80 stores across the country. Rather than franchise, Orfalea formed partnerships with each individual store's local co-owners. Since the stores were located mostly near college campuses and staffed by part-time students, the business was initially driven by the needs of university students. The clientele soon expanded to include other high-end document users, such as job seekers printing resumes and business users generating professional documentation. Orfalea's open-for-24-hours policy increased the stores popularity and led to the spread of Kinko's across the United States and internationally, and ultimately to more than 1,200 locations and 23,000 employees in 10 different countries.
• #17: "We must motivate ourselves to do our very best, and by our example lead others to do their best as well." S. Truett Cathy   S. Truett Cathy is the founder and chairman of Chick-fil-A, Inc. which created the chicken sandwich. The Chick-fil-A logo is "We didn't invent the chicken, just the chicken sandwich."  In 1946 Cathy launched his business working alongside his brother Ben and named their Atlanta diner The Dwarf Grill. After twenty years of working in the restaurant business, Cathy decided to do something different and he founded and opened the first Chick-fil-A restaurant in Atlanta's Greenbriar Shopping Center.  His dedication to help Chick-fil-A prosper, when coupled with his many charitable contributions, has demonstrated time and again that Cathy deserves a gold star for a lifetime working to do his best so that others may do their best.
• #23: "The gap is growing between those who know the new career rules and have the new skills of a global economy, and those who clutch to old ways of thinking and rely on commoditized skills. The question is: which are you? Can you adapt your career plans as you change or as the people around you change?