Some people know what they want to do from an early age and focus on it
relentlessly. Others reinvent themselves, changing careers and industries until
they find something that works. As a reminder that the path to success is not
always linear, we've highlighted what Richard Branson and 9 other fascinating
and successful people were doing at age
25. Richard Branson had already started the Virgin Records record
label. At age 20, Branson opened his first record shop, then a studio at 22 and
launched the label at 23. By 30, his company was
international. Those early years were tough, he told Entrepreneur: "I remember them vividly.
It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it
is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a
business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to
hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really
matters — and that's
surviving." JK Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series on a
train. In 1990, Rowling was 25 years old when she came up with the idea for Harry
Potter duirng a delayed four-hour train
ride. She started writing the first book that evening, but it took her years to actually 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.在那天晚上她开始写第一本书,但她花了好几年才完成这本书。罗琳曾经在国际特赦组织的伦敦办事处当秘书,但是因为总在构思《哈利波特》的故事而被炒了鱿鱼,这其实让她在接下来的几年可以专注于写作。 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。 Marissa Mayer had just started her job as Google's 20th
employee. At 24, Mayer became employee number 20 at Google and the company's first
female engineer. She remained with the company for 13 years before moving on to
her role as CEO of
Yahoo. Google didn't have the sorts of lavish campuses it does now, Mayer said in an
interview with V Makers, "During my interviews, which were in April of 1999,
Google was a seven-person company. I arrived and I was interviewed at a ping
pong table which was also the company's conference table, and it was right when
they were pitching for venture capitalist money, so actually after my interview
Larry and Sergei left and took the entire office with
them." Since everyone in the office interviewed you those days, Mayer had to come
back the next day for another
round. Warren Buffett was working as an investment salesman in
Omaha. In his early 20s, Buffett worked as an investment salesman for Buffett-Falk
& Co. in Omaha before moving to New York to be a securities analyst at age
26. During that year, he started Buffett Partnership, Ltd., an investment
partnership in
Omaha. New York just wasn't for him, Buffett told NBC. "In some places it's easy to
lose perspective. But I think it's very easy to keep perspective in a place like
Omaha." Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was cash positive for the first time and
hit 300 million users. Mark Zuckerberg had been hard at work on Facebook for five years by the time
he hit age 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. 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. 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
masters and Ph.D. at 27 for 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." Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz hadn't even started out in the coffee
business; he 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 atage
29. On his job in 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." Lloyd Blankfein was an unhappy
lawyer. Blankfein didn't take the typical route to finance. He actually started out
as a lawyer. He got his law degree from Harvard at age 24, then took a job as an
associate at law firm Donovan
Leisure. "I was as provincial as you could be, albeit from Brooklyn, the province of
Brooklyn, "Blankfein told William Cohen at Fortune
Magazine. At the time, he was a heavy smoker and occasional gambler. Despite the fact
that he was on the partner track at the firm, he decided to switch to investment
banking, joining J. Aron at the age of
27. Ralph Lauren was a sales assistant at Brooks
Brothers. He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, New York, but changed his name at
the age of 15. He went on to study business at Baruch College and served in the
Army until the age of 24 when he left to work for Brooks
Brothers. At 26, Lauren decided to design a wide European-styled tie, which eventually
led to an opportunity with Neiman Marcus. The next year, he launched the label
"Polo." |
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