Successful people stories
In 1919, Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs at the Kansas City Star newspaper because his editor felt he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas," according to The Wisdom of Oz .That wasn't the last of his failures. Disney then acquired Laugh-O-Gram, an animation studio he later drove into bankruptcy. Finally, he decided to set his sights on a more profitable area: Hollywood.
He and his brother moved to California and began the Disney Brothers' Studio, eventually creating Mickey Mouse and Disneyland and winning 22 Academy Awards
Thomas Smale •
Contributor
Founder of FE International
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Is formal education a necessity? Do you need to go to school if you want to build a successful business?
Most people are brought up to believe that going to school, getting good grades, working really hard and getting a good job are the steps you need to take to become successful. Today, a good education and gainful employment are merely the status quo -- these qualifications are no longer a proven formula for wealth and success.
Education certainly has its place, and it isn't completely without merit, but it also isn't necessary all of the time. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that never had much of a formal education, but still managed to achieve a great deal.
What follows is an exploration of several personalities that made their marks on the world in spite of their lack of formal education. Study these case studies for yourself to determine whether you need to go to school to build a profitable business.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Even Through Humble Beginnings, Persistence Wins Over All, Says Gary Vaynerchuk
While watching the people you admire at the top of their game, it can be easy to forget that they had to start from somewhere too. With that in mind, this week, VaynerMedia CEO and co-founder Gary Vaynerchuk took some time to celebrate 12 years of creating long-form video content and reflect on how much has changed since then.
Though today Vaynerchuk has a giant, devoted audience of more than 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, 3 million Instagram followers and 1.68 million Twitter followers, his first video project was as casual as they come.
“I asked somebody on my team at
Wine Library to run to Best Buy, pick up a little Canon camera, set it up and hit record. I picked three bottles of wine and put them on a table. I reviewed the wines and I filmed it,” he recalls in a blog post.
Vaynerchuk attributed the success of not just his video projects but all of his endeavors to consistency, patience and always stopping to appreciate every milestone along the way. Even if they were seemingly modest achievements, they were important because they were signifiers of progress.
“I think people underestimate those small wins. They’re so focused on getting to a million views, or a million followers, that they forget about how special it is to have 500 followers,” Vaynerchuk explains.
He writes in the post about how much joy it brought him in the beginning, when a customer would come into the store and talk with him about an episode. He had a million subscribers but it showed that he was making an impact -- and that inspired him to keep going and work to engage his audience every day.
“I think perspective is what gave me the ability to keep moving. To be consistent and persevere and always try to provide value,” Vaynerchuk writes. “I just understood that I had something and I felt that I could fight through. I was enjoying the process, I wasn’t doing it to become rich, so I was never impatient. I built my reputation brick by brick by brick by brick, and 12 years later I looked up, and I’ve got a building.”
Steve Jobs
Late Apple co-founderLate Apple co-founder Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs famously dropped out of college and went on to build one of the most successful and iconic companies in history. But before his entrepreneurial days, Jobs was a kid in need of some extra cash.
Next month, a job application that Jobs filled out in 1973 will sell to the highest bidder through Boston-based
RR Auction. Jobs would have been 17 or 18 when he wrote the application, though the position and company he was applying to are unclear. The auction house estimates the document will sell for at least $50,000, despite it being creased and stained with a bit of tape stuck to it.
The information he provided on the one-page document features grammatical errors, though it shows that Jobs knew tech skills were his strong suit even from a young age, although he specified his major as “english lit” on the application.
Under “special abilities,” Jobs wrote “electronics tech or design engineer. digital. -- from Bay near Hewitt-Packard [sic].” He also wrote “yes” next to “Computer” and “Calculator” and wrote “(design, tech)” below those categories.
He wrote his name as "Steven jobs,” with a lowercase j. He specified “reed college,” the school he dropped out of, instead of a formal address. Next to “Phone,” he wrote “none,” which is hard to imagine in the age of the iPhone. And next to “Access to transportation?” Jobs bodly wrote, “possible, but not probable.”
Jobs worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He died of complications from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
The auction for Jobs’s mysterious application will occur between March 8 and 15. famously dropped out of college and went on to build one of the most successful and iconic companies in history. But before his entrepreneurial days, Jobs was a kid in need of some extra cash.
Next month, a job application that Jobs filled out in 1973 will sell to the highest bidder through Boston-based
RR Auction. Jobs would have been 17 or 18 when he wrote the application, though the position and company he was applying to are unclear. The auction house estimates the document will sell for at least $50,000, despite it being creased and stained with a bit of tape stuck to it.
The information he provided on the one-page document features grammatical errors, though it shows that Jobs knew tech skills were his strong suit even from a young age, although he specified his major as “english lit” on the application.
Under “special abilities,” Jobs wrote “electronics tech or design engineer. digital. -- from Bay near Hewitt-Packard [sic].” He also wrote “yes” next to “Computer” and “Calculator” and wrote “(design, tech)” below those categories.
He wrote his name as "Steven jobs,” with a lowercase j. He specified “reed college,” the school he dropped out of, instead of a formal address. Next to “Phone,” he wrote “none,” which is hard to imagine in the age of the iPhone. And next to “Access to transportation?” Jobs bodly wrote, “possible, but not probable.”
Jobs worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He died of complications from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
The auction for Jobs’s mysterious application will occur between March 8 and 15. famously dropped out of college and went on to build one of the most successful and iconic companies in history. But before his entrepreneurial days, Jobs was a kid in need of some extra cash.
Next month, a job application that Jobs filled out in 1973 will sell to the highest bidder through Boston-based
RR Auction. Jobs would have been 17 or 18 when he wrote the application, though the position and company he was applying to are unclear. The auction house estimates the document will sell for at least $50,000, despite it being creased and stained with a bit of tape stuck to it.
The information he provided on the one-page document features grammatical errors, though it shows that Jobs knew tech skills were his strong suit even from a young age, although he specified his major as “english lit” on the application.
Under “special abilities,” Jobs wrote “electronics tech or design engineer. digital. -- from Bay near Hewitt-Packard [sic].” He also wrote “yes” next to “Computer” and “Calculator” and wrote “(design, tech)” below those categories.
He wrote his name as "Steven jobs,” with a lowercase j. He specified “reed college,” the school he dropped out of, instead of a formal address. Next to “Phone,” he wrote “none,” which is hard to imagine in the age of the iPhone. And next to “Access to transportation?” Jobs bodly wrote, “possible, but not probable.”
Jobs worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He died of complications from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
The auction for Jobs’s mysterious application will occur between March 8 and 15.
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