Inspiration Inspiration.....

 

INSPIRATION INSPIRATION……

 

Inspiration is a special state of a person, which is characterized by high productivity, tremendous lift and concentration of human strength. As an emotional concept, this state is a typical feature and an integral part of creative activity.

From the point of view of psychology, inspiration is the appearance of motivation for some action. Usually this is expressed in a special uplift, when a person feels an unexpected surge of strength, and his thoughts become clear and consistent. This state is often called enlightenment. This is especially well felt by creative people when at some point, unexpectedly, a brilliant idea and the strength for its implementation arises in their head. Motivation or inspiration is a sine qua non for generating thought activity necessary to solve the problem.

The success of world famous people can be an example and inspire. It can be a banal feeling of envy or, for example, sincere admiration - in any case, someone else's success can stimulate us to work harder and better.

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE

Mozart started playing the harpsichord at the age of four, at five he already wrote music, at eight he composed his first sonata and a symphony, and at eleven - his first opera. At the same time, in many instances creative abilities are revealed in one's middle years, or even in advancing age. There have been quite a few people who have left deep imprint in the history of culture and science, although their talent had not come to the fore immediately, and in some cases had manifested itself quite late. So, if you think you missed the train because you're not 20 anymore, you couldn't be more wrong. You're wrong even if you're 80. It's never too late to make an impact on the world !! So it's always a good time to start over or get off your hamster wheel.

Roman senator Mark Cato learned Greek language at the age of 80. Socrates only at the age of 70 learned to play many musical instruments and managed to master this art to perfection. Michelangelo created his most significant paintings at the age of 80. At 80, Goethe finished work on Faust.

The noted Russian writer Sergei Aksakov wrote his first book at 56, until then he had not written anything. Another well-known Russian writer Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) began writing fiction after the age of forty. Dmitry Mendeleev discovered the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements when he was... 35 years old !!

Sir Walter Scott finished his first historical novel at 43.  The Soviet composer Aram Khachaturyan entered a music school at 19. Nikolai Luzin, an eminent Soviet mathematician, was poor at mathematics in school and needed special coaching. The furious Richard Wagner could not read music until he was twenty.

Vrubel (painter) first displayed his talent when he was twenty-seven years old. No less instructive is the example of Chaikovsky. Chaikovsky's genius blossomed comparatively late, between 20 and 25. He did not have a perfect pitch, complained of poor musical memory and played the piano with some facility, but not very well, although he had played since childhood. He began to compose music after graduation from the school of law. But despite all this he turned out to be a brilliant composer.

Van Gogh didn't start painting until 27 years old and never received any formal training. Originally Van Gogh planned to be a pastor and worked as a lay preacher in Borinage, Belgium. It was only on being sacked from this job that he decided that his future lay in painting.

Alexander Fleming - This well-known Scottish scientist discovered penicillin (in 1928) at the age of 47, an antibiotic extracted from a fungus, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 at age 64.

Charles Darwin was 50 in 1859 when he published his undoubtedly one of the most important scientific works of all time “On the Origin of Species” which changed the scientific community forever.

At 27, Isaac Newton became a professor of mathematics and in his mid-40s published the results of his research in his landmark work, Principia Mathematica.

So at the age of sixteen and, even much later nobody has any reasons for saying, "I shall never amount to anything." One may only say, "I do not amount to anything yet." However, the sooner a person finds his calling, i.e.., the kind of work he likes most, the work he wants to do and will do with gusto and successfully, the better. But, to do this, one must have an idea about the different occupations and about oneself, one's own abilities for various occupations.

John Pemberton worked as a pharmacist until the age of 55. In 1886, he developed the famous Coca-Cola recipe.

Ray Kroc spent his career as a milkshake-device salesman before buying McDonald’s at age of 52 in 1954. He then grew it into the world’s largest fast-food franchise. Picasso's best works are those painted during old age. The saxophonist composer John Coltrane, one of the great jazz, revealed all his musical genius around forty years.

Grandma Moses started painting at the age of 78. If you have the determination, you can still make a difference after 70. One of her paintings sold for over a million dollars. Grandma Moses spent most of her early years working on a farm and raising children.

Henry Ford was 45 when he created the revolutionary Model T car in 1908.

British author Ian Fleming wrote the first James Bond novel when he was 44 years old. Prior to that, he worked for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division.

Peter Roget published the first edition of his English-language thesaurus in 1852 when he was 73 years old. Although he was a doctor, he had a passion for words and language, especially words that had the same meaning. He gave up his medical career to concentrate on writing the first thesaurus. The world's most popular thesaurus still bears his name. Peter Roget revisited his love of words—an interest that surfaced when he was a child—late in life. He started his work in 1840 at the age of 61.

Colonel Sanders, who managed to come up with an ingenious recipe for fried chicken that conquered the world, only invented his famous chicken recipe for the fast food brand Kentucky Fried Chicken at the age of 50. And he had before not very much to do with cooking, gastronomy or even entrepreneurship. Harland ‘Colonel’ Sanders was 62 when he franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1952. He sold his business 12 years later.

Dracula, Bram Stoker's most popular book, was written when he was 50 years old. Although he had written books before, Dracula is what made him famous.

J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t publish his first novel, The Hobbit, until he was 45 years old. He completed The Lord of the Rings when he was 56.

Mark Twain (original name Samuel Clemens), the American literature legend, published ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ when he was 41 years old.

Sam Walton founded WalMart, the world's largest supermarket chain in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962 at the age of 44. Before founding Walmart (the largest retailer in the US) at the age of 44, Sam Walton ran several retail stores - but they were doing so badly that Walton had difficulty even paying salaries to employees. WalMart became one of the largest companies and Walton one of the richest people in the world.

Miguel de Cervantes was 58 when he wrote his most famous novel Don Quixote. Of Course, Don Quixote was the second only to the Bible for being translated into the most languages.

Mysterious painter Paul Cézanne is now known as the father of modern art, but he spent most of his life experiencing ridicule and rejection of his work by others. Born into a wealthy family, Cezanne went to Paris to pursue an artistic career at a young age. However, he was disheartened that his early efforts were in vain. Because of his disappointment, he destroyed many of his paintings and even temporarily gave up art and entered the bank. But Cézanne persisted throughout the 1870s, barely able to sell his work and often seeing his own slammed by art critics. It was not until 1894, at the age of 56, that he held his first solo exhibition of paintings. It wasn't until the early 20th century that his work was widely acclaimed. After that, Cézanne finally found his style. In 1906, shortly before his death at the age of 67, he sketched his famous works Pyramid of Skulls and The Bathers.

Some modern examples of initial strugglers, mediocre students  and late bloomers....

Here are some more examples.. Representatives of the late bloomers league enter the game later than modern standards require. Morgan Freeman ended up in Hollywood at the age of 43, Vera Wang opened her first bridal boutique in New York City at 41.

Ellison worked in a software company until he was 34, and then founded Oracle, the multinational IT company that made him a millionaire. Mark Pincus, after years spent between failures, discovered his passion for video games and founded his company Zynga at an old age, only to become a millionaire at around 40. Jack Dorsey went from one job to another for years, until he found his passion in social networks. The most popular social network Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first own business, a taxi, courier and emergency management company founded in 2006, failed. Prior to that, the future entrepreneur worked as a programmer in the dispatch service in New York, and at the age of 20, he was a member of the punk movement.  Amancio Ortega at 13 had to leave school to work (his family was poor), he was a salesman until he was 37. He then he founded Zara.

Susan Boyle has become a famous singer after years of financial hardship, a partial mental handicap and the death of her mother. She was 47 years old.

Although Karl Lagerfeld was related to the fashion industry when he was 14, it was only later in life that he achieved great success. At the age of 82, he became the head designer of the famous Chanel brand.

Mark Cuban - The owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team. He worked up until 25 years old as a waiter in his own bar. He bought NBA team which won the NBA title in 2010. His net worth is an estimated $ 4.8 Billion.

Suze Orman - Finance guru, writer, lecturer and presenter. She was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley until she was 30.

Harrison Ford - Actor and producer. Known for films like Indiana Jones, Blade Runner or Star Wars. Harrison Ford, who studied philosophy at Wisconsin College, refused to take final exams for several small roles in films. He was a struggling actor  and even worked as a carpenter until the age of 30. Apparently the goal was set correctly. Ten years later, he  landed a role in George Lucas' American Graffiti, which catapulted him to stardom. After Ford’s first film, the producer told him that he would never achieve anything. He didn’t achieve real success before he was 35. But today, Ford is the third highest-grossing actor of all time.

The famous director James Cameron, after moving with his family from Canada to California, entered the university. However, his studies were abandoned, and he married a waitress and began working as a truck driver. Once, after watching the movie “Star Wars”, James Cameron decided that he would become a director. And he got his way. We know his work very well – the epic film “Avatar.

Andrea Bocelli, singer (until 33 was piano player at bars)

Sheldon Adelson - Founder of Las Vegas Sands. Until he was 30, he sold the shampoo. He has a networth of approximately $ 24.9 billion.

Rowland H. Macy (1822–1877) had a string of failed businesses, including a store in New York. But he continued to work and ended up building Macy’s, the largest department store in the world.

The first Nobel Prize winner in Physics - Roentgen in his school years, he was considered a difficult student: Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was expelled from a technical school for a caricature of a teacher. He entered the university without a school certificate, having passed difficult exams in physics.

Jerry Seinfeld - When Seinfeld first took the stage, the crowd booed him. But then he became a famous comedian and directed one of the most beloved television series.

Fred Astaire - At the end of Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the judges wrote: “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Dancing a little.” Astaire became the most famous dancer in history and entered the hearts of American women forever.

Sidney Poitier - After Sidney Poitier’s first screen test, he was told to stop wasting people’s time and “get a job as a dishwasher or something.” He also won an Oscar, and actors around the world admire him.

Lucille Ball - Ball was considered a third-rate actress for many years, and her agent encouraged her to do something else. But then she made a breakthrough with I Love Lucy, which has long been America’s most popular TV show.

Dr. Suess - Dr. Suess’ first book was rejected by 27 publishers. Today he is the most popular author of children’s books.

George Eastman – The founder of Kodak did not finish school. He dropped out of school after his father’s death to help his mother support the family.

Bismarck - The man who unified Germany, the first chancellor of the German Empire – Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) – In most subjects, Otto was a rather mediocre student, interested only in history and politics. He considered five years spent in the school as “prison” (from 7 to 12 years old) which were wasted in his childhood. The future chancellor of the German Empire, studied mediocrely and worked even worse. He managed to get a job only “by nepotism”, with which he was later either expelled.

Vasily Zhukovsky - The Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) was expelled at the age of 9 from the school “for inability”.

Frank Lloyd Wright - One of the most famous American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), dropped out of his studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after a year. Later, he was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts in 1955. In 1893, Wright was fired from company after the owner discovered that Wright had been accepting clients independently from the firm. After his death, he left more than 500 projects, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

J.K. Rowling - Writer of "Harry Potter", a book series that has sold over 450 million books worldwide. Rowling was unemployed, divorced and raising her daughter on a social benefit received from government while writing her first Harry Potter novel in 1995 and suffering from clinical depression. She even attempted to commit suicide out of frustration.  She said that she was as poor as can be in modern Britain without being homeless. British author J.K. Rowling published “Harry Potter” at 32. The media mogul didn’t gain international fame until the age of 32. In her early career, JK Rowling lost her secretary job because she spent too much time daydreaming about a preteen wizard. Getting fired helped kickstart her true ambitions. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book shortly after getting canned. It’s not about suddenly falling fame – it took time to accumulate experience and build up armour. For example, not to give up…When the first Harry novel was completed, Rowling could not publish it for a year - the manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers. The novel “Harry Potter” was rejected by 12 different publishing houses before Bloomsbury publishers accepted it. Today, she’s the multi-billionaire author of one of the most successful book series of all time. She is currently considered to be the sixth richest woman in England.

Ang Lee - Film director  - He was unemployed house husband until the age of 31. Winner of two Academy Awards for Best Director with La vida de Pi and Brokeback Mountain and Oscar for Best Foreign Film for The Tiger and the Dragon.

Mary Kay Ash - Mary Kay founder (until 45 sold books and home goods door-to-door)

Pejman Nozad - angel investor (until 30 rug dealer) Pejman Nozad left Iran in the 1980s and landed a job at a rug dealer in Palo Alto, California.

Amancio Ortega - Founder of the famous fashion brands Zara and Massimo Dutti  and former president of the Inditex business group. He opened his first Zara store when he was 39 years and until 30 he was shirt shop helper. One of the best known men in Spain and internationally. He owns a $ 57 billion fortune.

Andrea Bocelli - Italian tenor, musician and producer. He played in bars until the age of 33.

Ray Kroc - Founder of the McDonald's chain. He sold paper cups and windshield defrosters until he was 52. After becoming a volunteer ambulance driver during World War I, Ray Kroc spent most of his time as a salesman for paper cups and milkshake mixers. In 1954, while visiting a client in San Bernardino, California, he was employed by a local burger joint run by brothers Morris and Richard McDonald, where he mastered making the burger method. Kroc firmly believed that their business model would be successful in the world, so in 1961, the 53-year-old Kroc and the McDonald brothers joined forces to promote McDonald's to the world. Over the next two decades, he built McDonald's into the most successful fast food restaurant in America. In 1984, the year he died, the $2.7 million stake he bought in 1961 had appreciated to $8 billion, and McDonald's had opened thousands of locations. "I was an overnight star," Crocker once joked to himself, "but 30 years is a long, long night."

Hulk Hogan - American professional wrestler and actor. After failing to find work in movies, he became a fighter and found fame with 40 years. After they became known all over the world, they started hiring him as an actor.

Julia Child - Julia Child was 49 before she changed cooking in America. She published the most popular best-seller book "Mastering the Art of French Cuisine" when she was 49 and at that time her first TV show, "The French Chef", began. Julia Child's French cooking shows were a mainstay of television in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but in fact her love of food started relatively late. Long before she made her first French dessert, during World War II, Child had been writing and advertising for the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). It wasn't until she moved to Paris in 1948, to live with her husband Paul, that she had the opportunity to taste French cuisine for the first time. "I was fascinated," she later recalled, "that's what life is about." Child later enrolled at the Paris culinary school and co-authored her masterpiece, "Mastering the Art of Cooking French Cuisine". She made her public television debut in Boston in 1963, and at the age of 50, she began hosting the "French Chef" series, showcasing French cuisine to Americans.

Jan Koum – Jan Koum didn’t had a computer until he was 19. He raised from adverse poverty background to become a billionaire.  Koum was born in Kyiv (Ukraine), but in the 1990s he moved with his mother to Mountain View (California, USA). There, he started as a janitor at a grocery store, and for a while they survived on free food coupons.

He left Yahoo in 2007 and in 2009 when he was 33, he co-founded WhatsApp, the name based on the slang English expression “What’s up?” meaning “How are you?”. The WhatsApp app was released in 2009, and only a couple of hundred people downloaded it – mostly friends of Kum. After such a failure, Jan decided to quit WhatsApp and return to work, but his partner Brian Acton persuaded him to wait. And over time, this WhatsApp messenger has become one of the most popular in the world.

Stephen King - King’s first novel was rejected by editors 30 times, and Stephen threw it in the trash, disillusioned with his abilities. Later, his wife Tabitha found the manuscript and persuaded the author to finish it and send it to the publisher.

This work was the novel “Carrie”, which subsequently brought the writer 200 thousand dollars (2 million at the current exchange rate). To date, he has written 49 novels that have sold 350 million copies worldwide. And he is called the real “king of horrors.”

Tim Westergren - Tim Westergren founded online radio Pandora at the age of 35. Initially, the company was engaged in the sale of hardware. For two years after the creation of the project, Westergren didn’t had the opportunity to pay his employees a salary – until the company changed its profile and launched its own music service. He had to negotiate funding for two and a half years with more than 300 venture capitalists, as most of them were afraid to take on any obligations after the dot-com collapse. Before launching Pandora, Tim Westergren tried his hand as a composer, artist and babysitter.

Marilyn Monroe - Marilyn Monroe dreamed of breaking out of her family - and at 16, having left school, she got married... Monroe’s first contract with Columbia Pictures was terminated :- the producers told her that she was not beautiful and talented enough to be an actress. Monroe continued to pursue roles and became one of Hollywood’s most legendary characters.

Sylvester Stallone - Sylvester Stallone was so poor that he first had to sell his wife’s jewelry, then his dog too, to pay the bills. He was successful when the script for the movie “Rocky” was finally accepted (he was 30 when it happened)

Sylvester Stallone was trying to sell the script for the film “Rocky” on the condition that he starred, but it was rejected 1,500 times in a row. In the end, instead of the $325,000 previously offered by the agency for the “no Stallone” script (only if Stallone would not star in it), finally they compromised, the actor Stallone was paid $35,000 and agreed to all his terms. By the way, the total box office of this “Rocky” film was $225,000,000.

James Dyson – while working on the invention of the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, Sir James Dyson tested 5126 unsuccessful prototypes in 15 years and spent his savings. But prototype number 5127 worked, and today in the USA most vacuum cleaners are sold under the Dyson brand.

Steven Spielberg, one of the most successful filmmakers in history, applied three times to his dream University of Southern California and was rejected three times after hearing the not-too-inspiring “no talent” addressed to him. He decided to study elsewhere, but then dropped out to become a director.

Steve Jobs - It is not known whether the world today would see the Iphone, Ipod, if the founder of Pixar and Apple, Steve Jobs, received a full-fledged education at the university. He dropped out of college in 1973 at the age of 18. In 1976, together with Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak (who also dropped out shortly before), they created the Apple company, the starting capital of which was only $ 1,300.

Mark Zuckerberg - While studying at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg invented one of the world’s most famous social networks, Facebook. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2004 at the age of 20. Then he founded a company in Pal Alto.

Richard Branson - Founder and adventurer of Virgin group, He was always eloquent when talking about his disastrous upbringing. Having problems with the ability to learn due to dyslexia, he studied poorly. He dropped out of school at 16 and is now one of the richest people in the world. When Branson left school in 1967, the school headmaster, saying goodbye, noted that in the future he would either go to prison or become a millionaire. As it turned out, the teacher was not mistaken.

Born into the family of a lawyer and a flight attendant, Branson found it very difficult to study :- he suffered from dyslexia, received poor grades and constantly flunked exams. But instead of accepting, Richard decided to go into business. He founded a record company, saving on everything – he even delivered records to retail outlets in London in his own car.

The famous British entrepreneur Branson tried himself in a dozen areas :- telecom, publishing, beauty and entertainment, transport, energy, fintech and others. Some companies have gone bankrupt, others are working successfully. Now the Virgin Group business empire includes more than 40 companies in 35 countries with a total annual income of about $23 billion.

Today, Branson has a huge fortune, which he amassed through his conglomerate of Virgin companies. He is one of the richest residents of the UK.

Elon Musk - Now Musk is on everyone’s lips. He makes electric cars, reusable rockets, solar panels, and drills tunnels for Hyperloop vacuum trains. But the billionaire did not reach this immediately – the list of Elon’s failures is long. As big as all his companies were, so were the failures.

He nearly bankrupted PayPal and was removed from his position as CEO of PayPal and Tesla. The launch of the first SpaceX rocket into space ended in failure and breakdown at the start three times. And only on the fourth time, when Musk invested all his money, owed huge sums and practically became bankrupt, the launch turned out to be successful and the company was reborn like a phoenix.

SLOW STARTERS....

"Sorry, but if you have no talent, then, better leave your creative attempts and go to learn some respected applied profession."

"Untalented", "hopeless", "unpromising" - no matter how many labels society has hung on those who see life in their own way. But that's how the world works - if you are going to change it, there will always be someone who will be categorically against it. To prevent such from undermining your self-confidence, read the history for interesting recommendations cases that prove that nothing can force a true creator to retrain as a house manager.

It is important to note that initial tests do not reveal the wealth of a person’s intellectual world or measure his abilities, especially since these abilities may manifest themselves in different ways in different people and at different ages. A person’s creative talent may, for example, emerge when he reaches young adulthood or even maturity, so this should encourage people to develop their abilities even if they did not display any particular talents as a child.

Many of great people were, in their childhood and even early youth, regarded as slow-witted if not outright idiots.  Here are examples of truly outstanding people whose abilities were appreciated much later than in school years.

Scientist Albert Einstein started speaking late only at the age of four and couldn’t read until the age of 7 !! Einstein who showed no special ability in physics or mathematics as a child and was even below average as a pupil. Another outstanding scientist, Isaac Newton, was also behind in physics at school. He found physics and mathematics too difficult for him at school.

As a child, the inventor James Watt was considered virtually mentally backward. Jonathan Swift, and Karl Gauss were "dunces" at school, and were thought to be dull and incapable.  Carolus Linnaeus (Carl Linné)  was once informed he should become a cobbler.

The timid and inarticulate Demosthenes persevered to become Greece's greatest orator.
Helmholtz was thought to be a near imbecile by his teachers, while a university professor told Walter Scott that he was stupid and would remain so.

Charles Darwin's father thought his child to be ungifted. Charles Darwin was censured by his father who said, "You care for nothing but shooting, playing with dogs, and rat-catching, and you'll be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

But Darwin's hard work for more than twenty years, which was reflected in his book "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection”, brought him world renown and enriched science. In this book, he forwarded the theory of biological evolution, thereby destroying all kinds of idealism and the theory of immutability of species. In his autobiography, Darwin wrote, "I was considered by all my masters and my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect."

The great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) wrote mediocre essays as a child. According to the recollections of teachers and classmates, Gogol did not have much success in his studies, he was a lazy child, studied poorly, neglected the study of languages.  

The list could be continued but these examples should suffice.

Einstein – A slow starter….

Albert Einstein also seemed to be a defective  as a child, partly due to dyslexia, which manifests itself in difficulties in speaking and reading.

He developed more slowly than usual during childhood. He had such problems with speech that those around him were afraid if he would learn to speak at all… Every phrase that he was preparing to utter, even the simplest, he repeated to himself for a long time, moving his lips. This habit remained with him until the age of seven.

Einstein couldn't speak until the age of four, and his parents were very worried about this, and even worried that he would become a dumb. When he was young, Einstein seemed not smart at all, he was slow and shy, and he hesitated when he spoke, which even made people feel a bit "mediocre and slow". Until middle school, his parents still thought he was a mentally handicapped child. The school teacher's comments on him were: "dumb-headed, unsocial, and not very promising".  For example, he was often punished for not being able to answer the teacher's questions. Parents often worried that he was not as intelligent as other children. Teachers often called him "stupid", thinking that he could not be taught. In addition, little Einstein was taciturn and out of gregarious.

Even after entering middle school at the age of 10, he still lacked interest in rote classical education. Going to school was torture for him. The Greek language was given to the young Einstein with such difficulty that his teacher, unable to resist, once exclaimed: “You will never achieve anything…” He consistently had the lowest grades in the class, and his teachers scornfully called him a "little fool."

When the teachers heard that Einstein's mother hoped that her son could become a lawyer or a teacher in the future, they all laughed at it.

His teachers were half right. When he grew up, Einstein did not become a teacher or a lawyer, but became the greatest scientist of the 20th century, an achievement that his elementary school teachers did not expect. Einstein is a famous scientist, but no one would have imagined that his student career was like this.

Einstein was later expelled from school at the age of 14 and flunked his college entrance exam. Finally, while finishing his thesis for a bachelor’s degree, he could not get a place in a scientific institution, nor recommendations from his professors. Forced to take a low-paying job at the Swiss patent office, Einstein, at twenty-five, seemed doomed to a life of mediocrity.

But in the twenty-sixth year of his life, Einstein did the unexpected. In the summer of 1905 he published his special theory of relativity containing the famous formula E=mc². Sixteen years later, he won the Nobel Prize and became world famous.

Einstein was not recognised immediately. Certainly, he was working in a patent office, but soon after making his discovery he became a professor, incidentally on the recommendation of leading authorities on theoretical physics. Einstein published only in scientific journals, and it was only after his recognition by physicists that the laurels came his way. “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb trees, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid.” – this is one of the famous quotes of Albert Einstein.

WRONG EVALUATION

In many countries great store is set by tests. But... examination marks do not always aid the search. In fact they leave too much to chance, are oversimplified, and evaluate a sum of knowledge rather than an ability for actual work.

The master of Russian literature Anton Chekhov was also a repeater in school. Antosha was in the 3rd grade for two years in a row, and then in the 5th grade because of low grades in geography, arithmetic and Greek. Even in Russian literature and language, he had only a satisfactory grade.

By the way, Chekhov never got an A for writing. He never received higher than a "C" on his school essays. Teachers considered Anton Chekhov a mediocre student, in the famous writer's matriculation certificate. It is known that A.P. Chekhov grew up in a very religious family. So, at school, Chekhov was predicted to be a priest and a career as a clergyman. Great physiologist Ivan Pavlov also grew up in a very religious family of priests. He completed four years education in seminary to become a clergyman. But, he abandoned seminary for scientific studies in St. Petersburg. Sir Isaac Newton was predicted to become a farmer and assigned to run the family farm, but he failed miserably. Then he was sent to the University of Cambridge, and he became a physicist.

Swedish botanist and father of taxonomy Carl Linné was predicted the career of a cobbler. James Watt, Hermann von Helmholtz and Jonathan Swift were regarded as mediocrities at their schools, Giuseppe Verdi was refused enrolment at the Milan Conservatoire, and a university professor said of Walter Scott that he was a fool and would remain a fool. Hegel's graduation diploma stated that he possessed good abilities but scant knowledge, and was totally ignorant in philosophy. Thomas Edison’s teacher told him he was unable to learn. In 1752, after learning that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a notoriously bad student, had written a famous opera, his former employer said, "What? That fool?"

Louis Pasteur was born in the poor family of a leather tanner and was the fifth child. In his early school days Pasteur was not an outstanding student. ... His physics was classed as “passable”' and chemistry “mediocre”. Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15^th out of 22 students in chemistry. In his chosen field, Louis Pasteur made an unpromising start :- he failed a first attempt to obtain the degree of bachelor of science and, although he was only 25 years old and had just received a mediocre grade on his thesis.

Good grades and behaviour are not the key to a successful future person. For example -Dmitri Mendeleev often received "bad marks", and most often in Latin. Because of this subject, he could have left him more than once in the second year and even expelled from the educational institution. But the unfortunate student was saved out of respect for his father, who used to be the director of this educational institution. Some professors even doubted :- would the student Mendeleev cope? In addition to poor grades, the young Mendeleev also had problems with behavior :- he often took part in fights, and once even took part in a duel.

Roentgen, the discoverer of X- ray, was expelled from school when he was studying. Franklin, who invented the lightning rod, He didn't get a passing grade in mathematics when he was in school. Franklin's father really wanted to give his son an education, but his funds were only enough to pay for two years of schooling. However, this did not stop Franklin from being a passionate book lover, inventing the lightning rod and bifocals, and becoming one of America's founding fathers. Known as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb ", the famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was a famous urchin when he was young and was almost expelled from school when he was in elementary school.

Claude Debussy (French composer) and Leonardo Da Vinci never excelled in their studies. Not to mention the art of writing :- Unamuno failed the subject of literature. Marguerite Yourcenar never went to school and Balzac was a real disaster :- undisciplined, distracted...

Russian writer and satirist Mikhail Schedrin once wrote an essay for his daughter and got a "D", along with the comment, "Poor knowledge of the Russian language." Fyodor Shalyapin was denied admission to the conservatory.

The Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky studied quite diligently, but when entering the university, he passed the entrance exam only on the second attempt.

Leo Tolstoy novels, “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace” are pillars of classical literature. The writer, despite his skill, however, never managed to graduate in law. The cause, the poor performance !! Tolstoy was educated at home, and then decided to enter Kazan University, whose rector at that time was the famous mathematician Lobachevsky. Leo Tolstoy failed the entrance exams. The future writer was given low grades in geography, because Tolstoy could not remember the name of the seaside French cities. Due to systematic absenteeism and failures, Leo Tolstoy was expelled from the university from the second year. As a result, he did not receive a higher education. “All serious education is acquired through life, not through school” - This is one of the quotes from Leo Tolstoy.

The famous French mathematician Henri Poincare showed such a poor result on the Binet test that he was recognized as an imbecile (a person with an unusually underdeveloped intellect). Thomas Edison, the author of a record number of patented inventions – 1093 – so transformed the life of mankind, was famous in school for his slowness. Edison later recalled: “My father thought I was stupid, and I almost got used to the idea that I really was mentally retarded.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Russian-Soviet poet and playwright. He struggled to learn to read in the school.

Craig Venter, father of the human genome mapping and Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, also left a bad memory during their educational career. The first one was more interested in sailing and windsurfing. His grades were very poor. The second was a little attentive student. He left the university in the second year due to family problems. He is now considered the fifth richest man on the planet.

In 1890, young Winston Churchill’s mother wrote to him, “I had built up such hopes about you and felt so proud of you and now all is gone… your work is an insult to your intelligence. If you would only trace out a plan of action for yourself and carry it out and be determined to do so, I am sure you could accomplish anything you wished".

Wilhelm Wien - The German physicist had poor academic performance at school. He was even expelled from the school for this reason. The son of the landowner continued his education in private, which a wealthy family could afford. Wilhelm nevertheless received a matriculation certificate and even entered the university. Well, later he won the Nobel Prize for discoveries in the field of laws governing thermal radiation.

Rudolf Mössbauer - The German physicist himself has repeatedly noted that he did not get along well with teachers. Poor grades in physics explained the low quality of teaching. Well, you can take his word for it: after all, in 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize “for the study of the resonant absorption of gamma radiation and the discovery in this connection of the effect that bears his name.”

Faina Ranevskaya in 1992 was recognized by the editorial board of the English encyclopedia Who is who as one of the 20 outstanding actresses of the twentieth century. It’s hard to believe that when she got a job in a theater near Moscow, the artist was “honored” by the director with the epithet “complete mediocrity”.

Enrico Caruso was less fortunate. His music teacher was convinced that he had a bad voice and no musical ability: “You can’t sing. You have absolutely no voice. You sing like creaking shutters.”

There is a legend among lazy schoolchildren: "All geniuses studied poorly." Teachers argue with them. But in vain. Here is an example - It turned out that the Russian artist painter Mark Chagall, while studying at school, never received more than a “triple (or 3rd grade)” in drawing lessons... In Russia, grades are 5 “excellent”, 4 “good”, 3 “satisfactory”, 2 “bad”, and 1 “very bad”.

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill studied at Harrow school, where he consistently failed to get good grades in his classes. At age 12, Winston entered Harrow school, a private secondary boarding school. He failed 6^th grade and was considered “a dolt” by his teacher..  As Winston grew, he wanted to be a soldier, so he took the entry test for Sandhurst, which was a famous military school in England. After three failed attempts, Churchill passed the obligatory exams and entered Sandhurst Academy.

American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was told by an editor that her writings would never appeal to the public.

Exchange of professions....

Maxim Gorky passed the selection for an opera choir while Fyodor Chaliapin was rejected. Fyodor Chaliapin (1873-1938) -- The poor student Chaliapin decided to improve his financial situation and went to look for work as a singer in the choir and a journalist in the newspaper. The paradox of the situation was that they did not take him to the choir - they did not discover his singing talent. But they found literary talent. Life put everything in its place, and in the future the world nevertheless found the great musician Chaliapin. Almost the same anecdotal story happened to Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). He also looked for work as a choir singer, and later as a newspaper journalist. Unlike Chaliapin, Maxim Gorky passed the selection for an opera choir, but not selected as the newspaper journalist.

The famous opera impresario Orlov-Sokolsky was recruiting artists for the choir looking for singers with good voices. Fyodor Chaliapin auditioned for the vacancy of an opera singer, but was rejected. Orlov-Sokolsky did not find Chaliapin's voice fit for opera singing. But the young Alexei Peshkov (the future world famous writer Maxim Gorky) successfully passed the test and was accepted. This is not a joke. This incident actually happened, it happened in Kazan and is described in the Kazan newspaper "Volzhsky Vestnik" in issue no. 178 in 1902.

Fortunately, in this case, too, life put everything in its place, and later the world recognized the great writer – Maxim Gorky. Fyodor  Chaliapin too became world famous opera singer in the later life)

Great chemist - Slate board......

Russian chemist, creator of the theory of the chemical structure of organic substances,   Alexander Butlerov (1828–1886) received his primary education in his childhood in a private Kazan boarding school, which was established by the teacher Topornin. And already there, the young pupil Alexander  Butlerov began to fiddle with some mysterious liquids and chemical flasks.

One day, the chemical experiments of an inquisitive boy caused a strong explosion in the basement of the boarding house. In those years, students of gymnasiums and real schools, even the offspring of high-born elite families, were relied on rods for such an offense. But Butlerov escaped this humiliating punishment, because the teachers of Mr. Topornin’s boarding school did not, in principle, use the rod in the educational process. But on the other hand, they came up with a personal and special punishment for the young demolition worker: Alexander Butlerov was taken to the dining room with a black slate board on his chest, on which there was an inscription in chalk:  “Great chemist”.

Looking at the sad boy with prophetic words on his chest, the junior students laughed, the senior students laughed, and the teachers delicately hid their smiles in their mustaches and palms. And none of them then had any idea that the far-sighted foresight of the teachers was destined to come true.

The story of Edison....

Thomas Alva Edison, the man we owe a myriad of inventions to. "The King of Invention " Edison was frail when he was a child, and was diagnosed by a doctor as having a brain disease. Like most children, Thomas Edison went to school at the age of 7. But the future genius studied there for only for a year. Despite his mother being a school teacher, his grades were very poor, he was an inferior student in the class. In 1855, at the age of eight and a half, Edison entered school. After three months of attending, he returned to his house crying, because the teacher had described him as a "sterile and unproductive" student. The stubborn, weak and sickly, became the laughing stock of his peers in his childhood. In the short time he spent at school, he had no difficulty occupying the last row, and was considered a fool by his father himself. Edison recalled, "My father thought I was a fool, and I almost believed that I was really an idiot." Teachers considered Edison so incapable of learning that they even asked his mother to pick up the boy from school. So, his mother took him out of school and taught him at home until the age of 11. The boy was practically deaf. However, due to poor hearing, he could fully concentrate on the experiments. When Edison was 9 years old, his mother gave him an elementary scientific book "Natural and Experimental Philosophy by Richard Parker" which contained information about how to conduct chemical experiments at home. At the age of 10, Edison created his first laboratory.

Edison anecdotes were reproduced endlessly throughout his life :- he set up a chemistry laboratory at the age of ten; at fourteen he sold newspapers in a train and has his laboratory in one of the baggage cars in train; at 15 he learned telegraphy to be employed as telegraph operator and quickly becomes one of the best.

At 21 he made his first important inventions :– a device for counting votes in parliament and a device for automatically recording exchange rates – turned out to be of no interest to anyone. But later, his gold and stock bulletin telegraphy system was bought by a New York company for $40,000. As a result, Edison founded his own company and devoted himself freely to invention and years later, became the owner of almost four thousand patents around the world.

Without graduating from any educational institution, Thomas Edison went down in history as an outstanding inventor who received more than a thousand patents. He founded the General Electric Company and became a millionaire. Among the most famous inventions of the scientist are a telephone transmitter, phonogram, an incandescent lamp, a kinetoscope, an electric electoral vote counter and an iron-nickel battery. Each of his inventions made life easier for people and contributed to scientific and technological progress. Notably, Edison's early inventions were ridiculed. After which he developed the principle: "Never invent what is not in demand, and what cannot be put into practice."

Bill Gates had failed in almost all school subjects....

There are also examples in the modern world where losers achieved success in the future. Bill Gates is one of the richest people on the planet, although he studied very badly at school. He failed in almost all school subjects. Bill Gates said “When I was expelled for poor progress, I lied to my dad that I took an academic leave... I am in it to this day”. Immediately after leaving the Harvard university at the age of 20, Bill created Microsoft. The future billionaire became interested in computers from the age of 13, and in his second year he already developed the BASIC programming language. Neither parents nor teachers would have thought then that Bill would become such a successful entrepreneur and public figure, as well as one of the founders and shareholders of Microsoft. An incomplete higher education did not prevent Bill from making a fortune of $50 billion and becoming one of the richest people on the planet. By the way, Bill still received a Harvard degree at the age of 51. This event took place in 2007.

What a turnaround....!!!!

The report of the science teacher was unappealable. "It has been a disastrous half. His work has been far from satisfactory. His prepared stuff has been badly learnt, and several of his test pieces have been torn over; one of such pieces of prepared work scored 2 marks out of a possible 50. His other work has been equally bad, and several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way. I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous, if he can't learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be sheer waste of time, both on his part, and of those who have to teach him."

The student in question was John Gurdon. Half a century after this devastating trial, in 2012, on his 64th birthday, Gurdon has taken revenge by winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine. His poor results at Eton School, where the science report shows that he scored a miserable 2 out of 50 in a test, did not prevent him from rising to the top of his professional career. The above-mentioned science report is now framed in Gurdons' office at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge.

Only one painting sold in lifetime….

Famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) was never famous as a painter during his lifetime and constantly struggled with poverty. Also he used to consider himself a failure and many of his paintings to be failures. Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime – that is – “The Red Vineyard”(1888). And this to the sister of one of his friends for 400 francs (approximately $50) at a Brussels exhibition in March 1890, four months before his suicide. This painting now resides at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. This didn’t stop him from completing over 900 paintings. The rest of Van Gogh’s more than 900 paintings were not sold or made famous until after his death. He committed suicide in 1890. Despite his early death at 37 years old, van Gogh produced over 850 oil paintings and 1,500 drawings and sketches. Today Van Gogh’s artwork sell for hundreds of millions of dollars and he is a household name.

Priceless painting

In the memoirs of Konstantin Korovin, an interesting incident is described :- one day in the summer of 1884, Korovin and famous Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) dined in a Kiev restaurant, and instead of paying, Vrubel offered the owner a watercolor painting. The owner raised a scandal due to the fact that instead of two rubles they slip him some kind of “daub”. Two days later, Vrubel brought the money and received the watercolor painting “The Oriental Tale” back… And for a whole century and afterwards, this painting has adorned the collection of the Russian Museum.

Teachers’ evaluation

In 1916, Famous Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), then still a student at the Tenishevsky School, published a collection of poetry at his own expense. All 67 poems were publicly criticized by the teacher of the school – V. Gippius. Nabokov considered the criticism fair, but, fortunately, he did not refuse to write… By the way, the collection was the only book published in Russia during Nabokov’s lifetime.

Absolute lack of talent

“Absolute lack of talent” – such a resume was received by the 18 years old young artist Alfons Maria Mucha (1860-1939) from Professor Lgota when he tried to enter the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in Czechoslovakia. It is unlikely that at that moment the respected professor could imagine that a student who failed the exams in a few years would become an icon of Art Nouveau style.

Leave the thought

In 1832, an unknown young composer appeared at the Milan Conservatory, convincing the director to listen to his compositions. As an answer, the young man received a rather tough reply : “Leave the thought of the conservatory. If you so want to study music, look for a private teacher among city musicians.” This young composer was not admitted to the Higher School of Music in Milan Conservatory. The reason of rejection :- having exceeded the age limit by two years and the examiner did not like the way the composer Verdi placed his hands on the piano !! and moreover, according to examiner, Verdi did not possess musical aptitude. Giuseppe Verdi never digested the non-admission, so much so that during his lifetime he did not authorize the Milan Conservatory to use his name. But, decades later, this same Milanese conservatory fought for the right to be named after the great, albeit rejected earlier by composer Giuseppe Verdi when he was alive. This 19th century Italian opera composer was one of the most influential of his time. In fact, even today he continues to attract people from all over the world to listen to his already classic compositions. His best-known work was 'Othello', which premiered on February 5, 1887, at the age of 74.

Rousseau - most influential philosopher....

In his early career, Rousseau spent most of his early career in trying different jobs around Europe, he worked as a tutor, secretary and music transcriber, but often failing. At the age of 38, he had only one outstanding achievement - His article entitled "Discourse on Science and Art" won an essay competition held by the Dijon Academy. Rousseau went on to write some of the most influential works of the 18th century, including the popular novel "Julie, or The New Heloise" and the political treatise "The Social Contract". The Social Contract, published when Rousseau was 50 years old, made Rousseau one of the world's foremost philosophical thinkers and later the enlightenment of the French and American Revolutions.

Columbus and mutiny…..

The story of the threatened mutiny is one of the most dramatic episodes of the first voyage. The incident took place on Wednesday, 10 October 1492, after they had been at sea for over 60 days without seeing land, Columbus’ doubtful crew wanted to turn back.

The sailors, who had been concealing their discontent, now openly threatened insurrection. They had come to believe that Columbus, the foreigner from Genoa in Italy, had deceived them; they supposed he was leading them on a journey from which they would never return. According to one account, the sailors even conspired to do away with their leader, whom they “planned to throw into the sea”. Yet, “Columbus, by using gentle words, holding out promises and flattering their hopes, sought to gain time, and he succeeded in calming their fears”. Others have stated, after the fact that at this juncture, Columbus promised the men that they would return home if they did not sight land within two or three days.

Christopher Columbus faced a mutiny one day before discovering America. The sailors organized a mutiny without knowing that 24 hours later they would see the coast of what is today America.

On the night of the 11^th to 12^th, a sailor saw land after more than a month of sailing. Mission accomplished !! Land in sight ! the long-awaited cry of “Earth!” was shouted. It was the island of Guanahaní, renamed by Columbus as San Salvador, an island in the Bahamas.

The novel way to become rich…

François Marie Arouet (1696-1778), known to the whole world under the pseudonym Voltaire. French philosopher and writer Voltaire’s father spoke of him and his brother nothing more than: “I raised two fools. One is a fool in prose, and the other is in verse.” The future great educator first went to prison for 11 months in 1717, for a poem about the Dauphin Philip of Orleans.

In 1729, Voltaire’s friend, the brilliant mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine, came to the writer with a get-rich-quick scheme that actually worked. In Paris, lotteries were held in several areas of the city. As a mathematician, Condamine saw the fallacy of the government’s proposed lottery scheme. It consisted in the fact that the value of the prize exceeded the total cost of lottery tickets.  The plan was simple: they gathered friends and bought every last ticket in every district and, accordingly, always the chance to hit the jackpot was guaranteed..

The lottery was held monthly. Every month Voltaire and his friends became richer and richer. True, after a couple of years, the authorities realized that something was wrong (the inscriptions on the winning tickets also played a role) and stopped holding the lottery. However, Voltaire and Condamine were already rich by that time (each received about half a million livres - a huge fortune for that time). But since everything was done within the framework of the law, it turned out to be impossible to punish Voltaire and his accomplices.

Condamine became famous as a scientist. He led an expedition to South America, to the Andes. The expedition attempted to accurately measure the circumference of the Earth in order to then determine whether the Earth is a perfect sphere. It turned out that our planet is flattened at the poles. Thus, finally, Newton's assumption was confirmed that, due to its rotation, the Earth is not completely spherical. It is for these astronomical studies that Condamine's name is now immortalized in the heavens. This is the name of the crater on the visible side of the moon. Interestingly, Voltaire contributed to the glorification of the great English scientist . It was he who composed the legend of the apple, which, falling on Newton's head, inspired him to discover the law of universal gravitation.

The Beatles

On New Year’s Day in 1962, a then-unknown English rock band called “The Beatles” performed 15 songs for British Company Decca Records. The band believed the audition would land them a recording contract. But, It didn’t. They were rejected by the Decca Records, who instead opted to sign a contract with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” – This was the Decca Recording Company’s rejection remark to the Beatles,  (In total, the band was turned down by at least four respected recording companies after getting a fair hearing at each. The group was also turned down by Pye, Columbia, and HMV).

Fruitful rejection

Soichiro Honda was rejected by an HR manager at Toyota Motor Corporation when he applied for an engineering job, leaving him jobless until he began making scooters in his garage and eventually founded Honda Motor Company to become a billionaire. The African-American talk show icon Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first TV reporter job at the age of 23 because the authorities decided that her appearance on the screen was inappropriate. But Winfrey gathered her strength, continued to work and became the queen of television talk shows and also a billionaire. Stephen King’s first book, a horror novel "Carrie", was rejected by 30 publishers. Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job because he “lacked imagination and good ideas.” Never give up...Even being fired is no reason to give up your career.

Although Apple was already a consistent reality when he was young (When Jobs started Apple, he was only 21 years old in 1976), Steve Jobs was kicked out of the company when he was just 30 and had to start over. He only regained his role 5-6 years later.

Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985 because of a clash with the CEO. Jobs clashed with Sculley after two new computers — the Lisa and the Macintosh — failed to live up to sales expectations. Jan Koum applied to get a job at Facebook, but the company’s recruiters rejected his application. Later in 2014, he sold WhatsApp to Facebook for 22 billion dollars.

Vera Wong failed to make the US Olympic figure skating team. After her graduation in 1971, Wang began working at Vogue magazine, but her candidacy for the post of editor-in-chief was rejected. Then Wong became a wedding dress designer at 40 and is today a leading designer in the industry.

A horrible student…..

Joseph Brodsky, who was considered a horrible student, received the Nobel Prize in Literature decades later. At school, Joseph Brodsky was not a brilliant student.

The future Nobel laureate in literature seemed to despise learning. He did not like the education system itself, and he did not feel a special desire for knowledge. During the lessons, he demonstratively looked out the window, and also disturbed the teachers, constantly inventing some pranks. At the same time, he simply refused to answer the teachers’ questions, did his homework extremely rarely and very sloppily, and in high school he started skipping classes altogether. In the seventh grade, he had four poor performance remarks and spent two years for failure, and instead of going to the eighth grade, he got a job as an apprentice at a factory, closing the issue of education for himself forever. He applied to the second Baltic school, but he was not accepted.

Mickey mouse and failures…

Walt Disney slept at the school desk more than he studied (he worked hard to help his family), and he only had good grades in drawing. “Daddy”key Mouse and Snow White, owner of one of the iconic Hollywood film studios, billionaire and author of several hundred world-famous animated characters, Walt Disney has not always been so successful. Early in his career, in 1919, Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star newspaper from the position of a cartoonist. According to his editor, the reason was “Outstanding inability to draw and lack of imagination, good ideas”

That wasn’t the last of his failures. In 1922, Disney then acquired Laugh-O-Gram, an animation studio he later drove into bankruptcy. He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract riffraff. Finally, he decided to set his sights on a more profitable area: Hollywood. He and his brother moved to California and started producing a successful cartoon series.

Walt Disney did not give up, who became not only the creator of animated characters known and loved all over the world, but also the owner of the cult Hollywood film studio, who earned more than a billion US dollars with the help of his favorite business.

Alibaba and 40 failures....

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Ma used a computer for the first time at the age of 30.

Alibaba founder, Jack Ma during an interview at the annual conference of the World Economic Forum in 2015, Ma admitted that he was rejected ten times at Harvard. He also liked to cite statistics about his academic failures :- “I failed my elementary school cut-off test twice, I failed my high school exam three times, and finally, I failed my college entrance exam twice.”

In 1992, Ma decided that he needed to find a better job. He tried to get a job in 30 different places, but he was refused everywhere. After the first higher education in China, he, like other 23 candidates, came for an interview at KFC fast food chain. All other 23 applicants were hired. He was not. Jack himself said that the reason for the refusal was his unattractive appearance and small stature.

All this didn't prevent Jack Ma from becoming the most successful businessman in China. Jack took the name "Alibaba" from one of the most popular folk tales in Arabic - "Alibaba and forty thieves". He himself said that his website would open the door to the cave with treasures for small companies.

Every vision is a joke….

American rocket scientist Robert Goddard found his ideas bitterly rejected by his scientific peers on the grounds that rocket propulsion would not work in the rarefied atmosphere of outer space. “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.” – This was a famous quote from Robert Goddard.

Robert Goddard published an article in “The New York Times” on January 12, 1920. In the article, he presented the theory of a rocket that would make it possible to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and travel in space. In 1920, Robert Goddard was wrong. Physicists in the 1920s said that traction could only be created in the atmosphere. By definition, traction is the force that makes an object move against air resistance; for example, the force of air coming from a punctured balloon causes the balloon to zigzag across the room. “The New York Times” considered it impossible to create traction in space, since it is a vacuum without air and, alas, there is no air resistance that could be overcome. Robert Goddard had to endure ridicule and rejection for decades, and even some of the great thinkers rejected his theory based on fundamental physics. Goddard, however, went against the existing truth and did not abandon his theory. He died on August 10, 1945 without receiving any recognition for his work. It wasn’t until the successful launch of Apollo 11 in 1969 that “The New York Times” admitted its mistake and apologized.

Chronic underachiever….

Charles Schulz (1922-2000) American cartoonist who created “Peanuts”, one of the most successful American comic strips of the mid-20^th century. Schulz dominated newspaper comic cartoon series the same way Walt Disney dominated animation field. 

Schulz failed the 8^th grade in all subjects. He flunked Physics, Algebra, Latin and English in high school. Every cartoon  submitted by Charles Schultz was rejected by his high school yearbook staff. Despite this brush-off Charles Schultz was convinced of his abilities in drawing. He applied to Walt Disney Art Studios. He wanted to submit cartoons for Disney and was confident that he will not be rejected. They asked for samples of his work. He carefully prepared but, it was also rejected.

Charles Schultz started making a comic strip for a newspaper. He converted his own life story into comics cartoon series. The main character in comic strip was a little boy who symbolises the perpetual loser and chronic underachiever who failed in everything he tried. He  published his story in the form of comic strip in a local newspaper and gave money for publishing it. After sometime his comic started getting popular.  Newspaper asked him to make more comics. His cartoon series became so popular that it published in daily newspapers from October 1950 to Janurary 2000.

Charles Schultz, the man who never gave up after failing so many times was Charles Schulz and the World famous comic name is “Peanuts”. Peanuts cartoon series appeared in over 2,600 newspapers, with a 355 million readers in 75 countries, and it was translated into 21 languages.

A pure coincidence......

It turns out that the point is not that someone was naturally stronger or weaker, but that the child, due to the development of the body, turned out to be more enduring compared to the younger children. This also includes any other “accidents” that helped brilliant people achieve greatness: the Beatles were accidentally invited to East German City of Hamburg, and Bill Gates admits that if he had not been lucky enough to be in Lakeside school in 1968, everything could have been otherwise. (Lakeside school is a private school in the Seattle, Washington, area where he met Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.)

Although Pasteur said that "chance favors the well-prepared", all this would not have been possible if Jean Baptiste Dumas, a distinguished researcher and professor of that time, had not been his chemistry professor at the University. Pasteur's life then changed radically after Dumas's lectures and was fascinated. He was always located in the first row of the amphitheater for 800 people, where Dumas, with great virtuosity, enchanted his audience. Pasteur decided to study chemistry, offered himself as Dumas's assistant and his great interest in science was aroused.

The well-known musician Mozart can be considered lucky. Do you know why? Despite his talent, he managed to pass the entrance exam for the Bologna Philharmonic Academy by a whisker. Who knows what would have become of his life if he hadn’t been able to get in?

Saved the brandy maker….

Winston Churchill was an avid smoker and lover of strong drinks, among which he preferred Armenian cognac.

In 1942, Margar Sedrakyan created a unique brandy “Dvin” with a strength of 50% alcohol, which was first presented in 1943 during the Tehran conference. It was brought as a gift to Winston Churchill, who in those days was 69 years old. When the British Prime Minister tasted this drink, he declared that he would never touch another brandy again. Cognac was sent to Churchill by Stalin. Once Churchill noticed that the cognac had lost its former taste, and complained about this to Stalin. The point turned out to be that the chief technologist of the Yerevan brandy factory Margar Sedrakyan was arrested and exiled to Siberia for violations of orders and “fraud” in 1941. Well-known British politician, didn’t not know about the exile of Sedrakyan. After Churchill’s complaint, Sedrakyan was immediately returned and reinstated. Returning to Yerevan, the Sedrakyan restored the quality of Armenian cognacs, creating new popular varieties of cognacs. Thus, Winston Churchill saved the Armenian cognac and its creator, the legendary Markar Sedrakyan, from destruction.

MOZARTS’ GOODNESS

Some mediocre composers once began to deride Mozart. Then Mozart played a few bars from the compositions of each of them and praised their work. The composers then told all and sundry that Mozart himself played their work and praised it.

Jack London - Amazing motivational writer.....

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876. By age 30 London was internationally famous for his books "Call of the Wild" (1903), "The Sea Wolf' (1904) and other literary and journalistic accomplishments.

The world famous gold rush began in 1896-1897. The news of the discovery of gold in 1896 in the Klondike River, in the Canadian territory of Yukon, spread throughout America. The news reached the United States in July 1897 amid a significant number of bankrupcies and the financial recession of the 1890s. The American economy was severely affected by the stock market panics of 1893 and 1896, which caused a widespread increase in unemployment.

In the spring of 1897, 21-years-old Jack London too attracted to the "gold rush" to escape from poverty and left for Dawson city in North Western Canada. He returned empty handed to home in the California in the summer of 1898 suffering from scurvy.

Later, he wrote :- “It was in the Klondike I found myself". It was not until Jack London returned from the cold North in 1898 that he fully committed himself to becoming a writer. London studied magazines and then set himself a daily schedule of producing sonnets, ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure stories, or horror stories, steadily increasing his output.

Although Jack London had published numerous short stories and even a few books prior to 1903, it was that year's release of "The Call of the Wild" that deemed Jack London as a successful writer. The novel quickly became a best-seller and demand for London's work skyrocketed. "The Call of the Wild" (1903), told the story of a dog that finds its place in the world as a sled dog in the Yukon.

London wrote about the powerful experiences of living in extreme natural surroundings, particularly the Yukon area during the Klondike Gold Rush. London's experiences in the Klondike Gold Rush were represented in his works like "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang". Jack London, always wrote about people who never give up in extreme conditions and were not afraid of anything.

Later, another famous writer Christopher McCandless followed his example in adventuring to Alaska to learn a new way of life.

Jack London did not find gold in the Klondike, but it was this difficult adventure that inspired him to write the stories that made him one of the richest and most famous international authors of his time. He became the first writer to become a millionaire based on his written work.

In 1909, Jack London wrote a motivational and most popular semi-autobiographical novel "Martin Eden".

The main character, Martin - This carefree young man, being an illiterate sailor, by chance, meets a beautiful girl from a wealthy family named Ruth, who changed his whole life. When communicating with a girl, he notices that she is much more educated than he is. And Martin has a desire, which then turns into a new goal - to get an education in order to become worthy of that beautiful girl.

Martin decides to go to the library and devote maximum time to reading, studies the features of language, literature, and poetry. He begins to work hard and study at the same time, in order to become equal to his beloved girl, and he has a dream... to become a successful and famous writer !! and win the love of the desired girl. And it was the beautiful Ruth who became the impetus for Martin's self-development.

But, everything that comes out of Martin's pen is rejected by magazines and publishers. Martin starves, sleeps little, works hard - and all this does not lead him to success. Days, weeks, months go by, every day gets worse and worse because his work brings, in general, nothing. Only tiny money could be received for his works (publishers simply did not want to print his serious works), and then this meagre money went to pay off debts, pay for a room and rent a typewriter. Martin was exhausted and depressed, but he believed... until the last believed beautiful Ruth, who had been waiting for 2 years for his success moved away from Martin. 

Having overcome all the ups and downs, deprivation and humiliation, Martin finally becomes a successful and famous writer !!

Fame and money comes to him very quickly. Every magazine wants to print his new works, to sign a contract for long-term cooperation, get an interview. On one of the evenings, Ruth comes to him and in tears speaks of her love. But... it was too late. He knew that she was not sincere, because a loving person is always and in any situation will be there. Saying goodbye to everyone, he leaves. Having achieved everything except love, Martin is disappointed in life. He did not get what he expected to receive. Tired of life, spiritually empty, the main character jumps into the water and... dies. A tragic end.....

"Martin Eden" is a novel about inspiration and power of love, human strength and spirit. The novel makes you think about what we live for and remember that life is unpredictable. "Martin Eden" is a novel about courage and perseverance, about the fact that you need to believe in your dream, your strength, and also about the fact that most people are deceitful and hypocritical. Social status is not a guarantee of honesty and nobility.

Henry Ford - dream came true....

"When it seems that the whole world is against you, remember that the plane takes off against the wind ,” exclaimed Henry Ford (1863-1947), a native of an Irish family who lived in the vicinity of Detroit. The parents of the future prominent industrialist were quite patriarchal. Being engaged in agriculture, they also demanded this from their son, whose soul did not lie in principle for this kind of work. He believed that the results of labour in farming did not pay off the efforts invested. As a result, at the age of 16, Henry ran away from home and went to work in search of a better life in a nearby industrial city Detroit.

At the age of 20, Henry Ford returned to the farm :- during the day he helped for the household, and at night he pored over inventions. To facilitate the work of his father, he made a threshing machine that runs on gasoline. The creation of the young self-taught became so popular that Thomas Edison acquires a patent for it. He also invited Henry to work in his own company - Edison Illuminating Company. From 1891 to 1899, the guy went from an ordinary mechanic to a chief engineer. In 1899, Ford left the Edison company and until 1902 was one of the co-owners of the Detroit Automobile Company. But, having failed to come to a consensus on management and production with other owners, he was forced to leave his post.

Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The young Ford had a dream - to design a car for everyone, which would embody the principle "A car is not a luxury, but a means of transportation."

“I will create a car for everyone - it will be made from the best materials by the best specialists according to the most accessible drawings,” Ford dreamed.

Henry Ford's first car company went bankrupt in early 1901. One month later, Henry Ford founded his second automobile venture, the Henry Ford Company. He abandoned the second due to a quarrel with partners, and the third failed to achieve high sales initially. Between 1903 and the 1908, Ford's third company manufactured nine different cars. The “Ford A” becomes the first car of his own production, :- Models A, B, AC, C, F, K, N, R, and S, but the company achieved real success only in 1908, with the release of the legendary "Ford T". Henry Ford suffered three times in business and went bankrupt five times before, at 53, he succeeded in Ford Motor Company. Thus, he became one of the greatest American entrepreneurs. Henry Ford was a first person who tried the possibilities of conveyor assembly at his enterprise. This made it possible to increase the speed of production of cars several times, and therefore make them cheaper and, therefore, affordable. It was thanks to the amazing value for money that the legendary Ford T took 50 percent of the market on the move.

It was Henry Ford who the world owes the industrial assembly line - an invention that made the mass production of complex automotive equipment affordable. No less famous is his main literary work "My Life, My Achievements", which is still being studied in universities as a classic textbook on labour organization.

Henry Ford never received a higher education and wrote with errors all his life. What did not stop the brilliant self-taught engineer from making a billion dollar net worth on his own inventions - he owned more than 160 patents. Henry Ford used to say, "If you're enthusiastic, you can do anything."

"It's never too late".......

It was 1960 when Alberto Manzi was selected by RAI–Radiotelevisione italiana (Italy’s national public broadcasting company) for what was to become one of the first examples of distance learning :- the educational show ‘Non è mai troppo tardi’ (It’s Never Too Late).

Alberto Manzi the Italian "teacher and pedagogue" who conceived the program "It is never too late" which was awarded by UNESCO as one of the best educational experiments on adults of that period…  A television show from the early 1960s (from 1960 to 1968), where a famous teacher gave lessons on television. Many people have learned to read and write by watching TV. In those years the number of illiterates was still very high and the RAI had invented a truly futuristic program.

Today you have thousands of “Maestro Manzi” at your disposal. Just go to any video platform (youtube, vimeo, etc.) to see how many things you can learn, even the weirdest. Keeping in mind that any learning " opens your mind to the world " and gives you a deep sense of self-efficacy which is one of the pillars of self-esteem.

One could almost dare and say that :- "It is impossible not to learn" (paraphrasing a famous axiom of learning)

The height of late blooming....

Hugo once said, "Forty is the old age of youth, and fifty is the youth of old age." Many of the most influential figures in history would surely agree with this statement. Many great people have only stepped on the world stage step by step when they are over half a hundred years old. Some of them recovered from wasted youth and great failure, while others benefited from career changes in their later years. For example, Laura Ingalls Wilder. She didn't start writing the book series "The Cabin on the Prairie" until she was 65 years old.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series has long been a favorite among American students, all of which Wilder wrote in his prime. Born into a pioneering family in 1867, Wilder spent her youth in cabins and rural countryside in Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota and North Dakota. After a brief career as a teacher in the 1880s, Wilder married and spent the next few decades farming and running a household. At the urging of her daughter, in the early 20th century, Wilder took up the pen and created the book "Pioneer Girl", which recounts her memories of her green years on the frontier. But the book failed to attract publishers to publish, so she revised and wrote "The Little House on the Prairie", which was also the stepping stone to her famous children's literature in the future. Wilder was 65 years old when the book came out, but she continued to write, eventually writing more of The Cabin. She was 76 years old when the last book in the "Cabin" series hit shelves.

About late bloomers....

If you weren't a straight A student in high school, didn't get into a prestigious university, and didn't become rich and famous at 25...don't give up on yourself !! A huge number of talented, successful and even great people have achieved success in adulthood: after 30, 40, 50 and even 70 years. This is the opinion of author Rich Kalagaard who wrote the book "Late Bloomers :- The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace".

In his book "Willpower Doesn't Work :- Discover the Hidden Keys to Success" author Benjamin Hardy described one modern example....

"Back in the late 80s and early 90s, backflips were considered an impossible stunt, just a fantasy from video games. Backflips became a reality in 1998 when motorsport videos began to spread like wildfire showing people trying to backflip by jumping off a ramp into the water. And suddenly the incredible “no-one-can-do-it” became possible. And over time it has become the norm. In 2002, Caleb Wyatt became the first person to successfully complete a backflip on a motorcycle landing on solid ground. This event changed the idea of ​​the impossible among motorcyclists. By 2006, Travis Pastrana had performed the first double somersault. And Josh Sheehan in 2015 - the first triple. Here it is, evolution in action !! Writer and public speaker Jim Rohn is widely quoted as saying, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with…"

ADVERSE CONDITIONS

Great Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov raised him above his background of illiterate peasantry. A peasant by birth, he became the first world-class Russian natural scientist, distinguished himself in various fields of knowledge and art. Mikhail's father was an illiterate peasant, and his neighbour, the peasant Ivan Shubnov, taught him to read and write.

Mikhail Lomonosov made a great contribution to astronomy – it is known about ten devices for observing the sky, designed by him personally. However, a scientist in this field managed to make a discovery that was far ahead of its time.

In 1761, Russian scientists calculated that on 6^th June, 1761, the planet Venus will pass the solar disk, i.e. for a short time planet Venus will occupy a position exactly between the Earth and the Sun. This moment was also observed by Mikhail Lomonosov, who noticed and described the effect, now known as the “Lomonosov Phenomenon”.

Its essence is the refraction of sunlight in the upper atmosphere of Venus, which is why a subtle halo appears around the planet. Lomonosov was the first scientist to conclude that, the refraction of sunlight is the proof of existence of atmosphere on the planet Venus. Later, the “Venus atmosphere” first described by Lomonosov was confirmed and studied using modern spacecraft.

In 1843, the outstanding sculptor Mark Antokolsky was born into a poor family in Vilnius, Lithuania. His sculptures "Peter I", "Yermak" and "The Chronicler Nestor" are distinguished for their mastery. He spent the years 1868-70 in Berlin, in near-poverty, working under difficult conditions. Then his statue of Ivan the Terrible, completed in 1870, was purchased for the Hermitage by Tsar Alexander II. Crowds of people went to view it, and he was awarded the title of Academician by the Academy. “I fell asleep poor, and awoke rich,” he said. “Yesterday I was unknown, but today I’m all the rage.”

Nikolai Lobachevsky is remembered as one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry. Nikolai Lobachevsky was born on November 20, 1712, in a rather impoverished family of the registrar I. M. Lobachevsky. This post, in the table of ranks of the Russian Empire, was equivalent to that of second lieutenant. "Poverty and want hovered over the cradle of Lobachevsky." Although he was born into a poor family (made even poorer by the death of his father when he was seven), Lobachevsky's mother ensured that he received a good education.

A woman by the name of Olga Skorokhodova, blind and deaf since early childhood, has become an eminent educator. In childhood, Olga Skorokhodova, lost her sight, hearing and speech because of illness, but thanks to the efforts of those who in the given case represented the socio-historical experience of generations she later grew up to become a poet and a scientist, a truly creative personality. The story is told in her book - How I Perceive, Imagine and Understand the World Around Me.

A pilot with both feet amputated, Alexei Maresyev, returned to his fighter plane and shot down many more Nazi planes.

In the context of these fundamental principles, it no longer appears surprising that even people whose health has been undermined disastrously sometimes retain remarkable intelligence and creative powers to the last, witness the writer Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904-1936), who heroically continued his work in a state of complete blindness and paralysis, confined to his bed by mortal illness, created remarkable works of literature.

How the Steel Was Tempered - this novel written by Ostrovsky had been Soviet youth's favourite for many years. Since 1935, when it first appeared, this novel has been published 290 times in 52 languages of the Soviet Union, with the total number of copies exceeding 9 million. It has also been published in many countries outside the USSR. This novel, in which Ostrovsky created noble, pure and inspiring characters of fighters for the Revolution, was written when he was bedridden, his health completely shattered by the grave wounds he suffered in the civil war. (When a 15-year-old youth, he fought in the ranks of the Red Army.)

Here is the famous quote from his novel “How the steal was tempered”.  

"Man's dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once, he must spend it in a way that will bring him no heartaches later on over a long array of years fruitlessly and aimlessly wasted, in a way that will not eventually torment his conscience, prompting self-reproach for a petty and wretched existence, in a way that will allow him to look back, in the end, and realize that all his efforts, all his strength were dedicated to the most splendid mission in the world -- to the liberation of mankind."

Let us recall the Nikolai Ostrovsky's description of a critical period in the life of Pavel Korchagin, the hero of his novel - How the Steel Was Tempered - when he realised that he was incurably ill, that life was no longer worth living and his hand reached out for his revolver. Then Korchagin gave himself the command:- "Put away that gun and never breathe a word of this to anyone. Learn how to go on living when life becomes intolerable. Make your life useful." Here, the author is showing that self-command in the life of Pavel Korchagin is particularly effective, because the hero is governed by a deep conviction of the need to continue serving society.

Somewhat similar incidence described by Goethe in his Faust. Faust is a tragic play in two parts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In his despair, Faust brews a poison to commit suicide. Just as he is about to take the poison, a chorus of angels appears announcing Easter day and stops him from completing the act.

Michelangelo Buanorotti spent four years painting the vaults of the temple, lying on the scaffolding, as a result of which he almost completely lost his sight.

The well-known runner Znamensky told writer Zelenin how he had taken revenge on his fellow villagers who, because of their naive cruelty of early youth, had called him a runt. Systematic training enabled him to become a champion runner. Incidentally, when he was a champion of the USSR he had a heart rate of 40 at rest and relatively low arterial pressure.

A famous example was the English writer William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). He suffered from severe pseudoneurotic stuttering from early childhood and therefore could not communicate with people properly. Nevertheless Maugham entered a medical college, graduated successfully but then could not work as a doctor because when he attempted to converse with his patient, he would stutter so badly he sometimes could not utter a word. When he had been an adolescent, Maugham noticed that if he wrote something that worried him, he felt calmer and even stuttered less. This feeling of relief from writing appeared each time when he gave vent to his feelings in writing. This probably encouraged him to go in for literature and he soon became a professional writer.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote with errors, but did not master division and multiplication in the school. Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him “hopeless as a composer.” And, of course, it is known that he wrote five of his greatest symphonies while completely deaf. At the age of 27, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. In his profession, this was a disaster on a double scale. By the age of 48, Beethoven had lost his hearing completely. At the same time, thanks to the absolute inner ear, the composer was able to compose music even in such a difficult situation.

German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) dropped out of theological studies school due to severe mental problems which culminated in suicide attempt in a school-age.

The most famous and still popular author of detective stories, Agatha Christie (1890-1976), whose books have been translated into more than 100 languages, was considered a slow child. The girl could not really answer a single question. But she spent hours talking with imaginary friends. Little Agatha learned to read early, but she could not master the grammar, although she practiced for hours. She studied at the boarding school for only a few months, distinguished herself by monstrous mistakes in dictations, and once fainted before a concert at which Christy was supposed to perform. The writer did not cope with the panic fear of public speaking.

A man of brilliant and sharp mind, a famous playwright, he really did not like school, which he left at the age of 16 and started to work as a junior clerk. Nevertheless, hard work on himself allowed Bernard Shaw to hone his talent and eventually become what he became.

Russian actor Ostuzhev after he lost hearing remained on stage to make himself unforgettable as a great tragic actor. But then only a few people know Lina Po, a superb sculptress and our fairly recent contemporary who died in 1948. She suffered a total loss of vision and yet sculpted lovely figurines and portraits - more than a hundred in all. She somehow managed to recall from memory a pre-conceived work, fully preserving it, not losing a trait, nor a single detail, and utilize her fine sense of touch to carve it out in substance.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe. A man whose rare mental poise, optimism and tranquility won him the name of the Great Olympian, his character as a young man included a weak and volatile temper, indecision and fits of melancholy. By regular training and holding in check his emotions, Goethe managed to alter himself. By his own account, he told himself in January 1824 that although he had been always considered fortune's pet and although he neither complained nor disapproved of his lot, in actual fact there was nothing in his life but hard work. So much so that at 75 he was able to say that he had never spent even four weeks on holiday, as though he had all the time been carrying uphill a stone that kept rolling down and had to be carried up again.

Contemporary science holds that a need, interest, passion, impulse, and drive are very important to creation, invention, discovery, and the acquisition of unknown information. But those are not sufficient. Other necessary ingredients are knowledge, competence, skill, and professional excellence, and no amount of talent, devotion or inspiration can substitute for this.

It is appropriate to recall he the quote of Anastasia Oringo – In the end, it doesn’t really matter how you get inspiration. The main thing is to put it in the right direction !!

Maxim Gorky's life events were much similar to a Hollywood movie plot.....

Alexei Peshkov was popularly known as Maxim Gorky. The great world famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky's actual name was Alexei Peshkov. "Maxim Gorky" was his pseudonym.

Maxim Gorky's childhood was laden with poverty and horrifying brutality. When the boy was five his father died. The early death of his parents, the upbringing of his tyrant grandfather and the constant need for money forced him to go to work at the age of eight. In the autobiographical story "Childhood", the writer added the grandfather's phrase: "Well, Lexey, you are not a medal on my neck, there is no place for you  but to go and join the people..." His grandfather afforded him only a few months of formal schooling, sending him out into the world to earn his living.. At the age of eight, he quit school and was apprenticed to various tradesmen, including a shoemaker and an icon painter. Leaving home at age 12, the young Gorky learned self-reliance and began to educate himself by reading.

His jobs included, among many others, work as assistant in a shoemaker’s shop, as errand boy for an icon painter, and as dishwasher on a Volga steamer, where the cook introduced him to reading—soon to become his main passion in life. Frequently beaten by his employers, nearly always hungry and ill clothed.

The 15-year-old boy Gorky had a passionate dream - to study at Kazan University. He dreamed of entering Kazan University, but he was denied admission to Kazan University because he didn't possess school passing certificate.

A difficult childhood affected the Gorky's mental health, he was unbalanced, prone to gloomy and even suicidal thoughts. In December 1887, Alexei Peshkov tried to commit suicide because of his unrequited love for Maria Derenkova. Maria Derenkova was an acquaintance of Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky) during his stay in Kazan (1884-1888).

Gorky wanted to shoot himself with a revolver in the heart area, but the bullet missed the organ by just a couple of millimeters. He could have died on the spot from loss of blood if Mustafa Yunusov, the night watchman of the Fedorovsky Monastery, had not been nearby. The wounded Gorky was rescued, he was operated on in a Zemstvo hospital (now a cardio dispensary on Gorky Street).

True, this attempt turned out to be unsuccessful - even having studied the structure of the human chest in the anatomical atlas, he nevertheless missed, did not hurt the heart, pierced the lung. In general, throughout his life, Maxim Gorky tried to commit suicide more than once. He had suicidal tendencies. But every time he managed to avoid death. For a suicide attempt in 1887, he was excommunicated for 7 years.

Following his suicide attempt, Gorky set off on a two-year trek around Russia, ranging from Nizhny-Novgorod to Ukraine, the Caucasus, Tbilisi, and back again. He spent about a year in Tbilisi, working as a blacksmith, then a railway clerk while at the same time participating in underground revolutionary circles. It was also at this time that Gorky wrote his first story, "Makar Chudra", which was published in a Tbilisi newspaper.

During his trip, Gorky got to know the poor and downtrodden, bums, thieves, and prostitutes–characters who played a major part in his future writings.

The long path of searching for a profession led Gorky to journalism :- he wrote his first essays and stories for provincial magazines under the pseudonym "Yehudiel Khlamida". In 1892, Gorky returned to Nizhny-Novgorod, where he took a job as a reporter for a provincial newspaper and continued his writing. Later, the writer came up with another fictitious name for himself "Maxim Gorky", under which he became famous. His 1893 story "Chelkash", about a harbor thief, was an immediate success, and by 1895 his works were appearing in Petersburg publications. His Essays and Stories (vols. 1-3, 1898-99) evoked an unprecedented response in Russia and abroad. Thus, Maxim Gorky became a renowned author.

Maxim Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868, and in 1932 the town was renamed in his honour by the Soviet regime, although afterwards its original name was restored in 1990 after the collapse of Soviet communist regime.

Gorky's works have been printed and reprinted countless times in the Soviet Union and have been translated into most languages. "The Mother" is a most famous novel in the world written by Maxim Gorky in 1906 during the author's trip to the USA  about revolutionary factory workers. Translated into innumerable  foreign languages, "Mother" had become a reference book for millions.

Ill-fated Kostya (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky)......

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was a great Russian rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory and regarded as "The Father of Rocketry." Tsiolkovsky had a bitter childhood and youth period. When Kostya (Konstantin) was nine years old, he caught bad common cold while sliding from a snow mountain at the beginning of winter. The cold proved to be a severe case of scarlet fever with complications, parents thought that the boy would not survive. However, he soon got better, only almost deaf. Peers at school laughed at him, teased him, and he greatly annoyed the teachers because he did not hear them properly. The deaf student was embarrassed by his classmates, received physical punishment, and was repeatedly locked in a punishment cell for misconduct. After the death of his mother in 1870, Konstantin began to study even worse and was left for the second year.

After three years of such torment, Konstantin was expelled from school. After that, he never studied at any educational institution. He began to study independently. His father's library became his school, his disability became his driving force. The boy spent all his time in libraries and a carpentry workshop. At the age of 14, Kostya had already made a lathe machine. He set up dozens of successful and important experiments for science. In 1876, his father helped Tsiolkovsky get a job as a tutor. In this profession, Konstantin was successful. His own teaching methods gave good results. In 1878, Tsiolkovsky successfully passed the exams to confirm the qualifications of a teacher. Living on the insignificantly small salary of a schoolteacher in the town of Borovsk, later in Kaluga (a small city in Russia), almost deaf as a result of childhood illness, Tsiolkovsky spent all his free funds on experiments in which he was interested. And years later, he made discoveries, thanks to which the scientists of the USSR were able to build a rocket and send the first man into space. His contribution to astronautics cannot be overestimated :- without the developments of Tsiolkovsky, the flight of Yuri Gagarin is inconceivable.

Sergei Korolev – spent four years in prison

He was supposed to drown, but he was late for the ship that sank in the Pacific Ocean killing about 700 people, he spent four years in prison where he was supposed to die in the prisoners’ camp, but survived, he was dying of hunger, he lost 13 teeth due to scurvy, he thought he would not reach the home, and here is a new miracle :- someone lost a loaf of bread on the road, and Sergei Korolev found it. He survived and returned home then thanks to this loaf. He was not awarded the Nobel Prize twice, and he also broke up with his wife, who was waiting for his release from the prisoners’ camp… But the outer space became closer to humanity precisely due to him. Sergei Korolev was released from prison in 1944 with the removal of a criminal record. Thanks to his colossal persistent efforts, on October 4, 1957, the first satellite was successfully launched in the Soviet Union. Today, 4852 operating (active) artificial satellites revolve around the Earth. The largest constellation of satellites is the American one, with a total number of 2944 satellites, China has 499 satellites, the UK has 452.

Sergei Korolev was the Soviet astrophysicist and engineer who, despite having launched the artificial satellite into outer space, faced innumerable adverse conditions throughout his life. In the first half of the 20^th century, not everyone believed in the possibility of space exploration. Even in the 1950s, Academician Pyotr Kapitsa did not think that space exploration was possible. In Russia, Sergei Korolev and many other famous rocket scientists began experimenting with rockets in the Jet Propulsion Research Group. Research at first was carried out at their own expense, so young rocket scientists deciphered GEWN as "a group of engineers working for nothing." But the dreamer and visionary Sergei Korolev was able to convince the academicians, the government, and the military of the importance of this area of ​​scientific research.

Sergey Korolev was born in 1907 in the family of a schoolteacher Pavel Korolyov and the daughter of a merchant – Maria Moskalenko. This marriage was not happy, and soon the parents divorced. For many years, his mother told Sergei that his father had died, although this was not true. His mother left to study, and Sergei was raised by his grandparents. Research suggests that children from single-parent or problem families often compensate for their childhood traumas with heightened ambition and the accompanying over achievements.

Sergei Korolev, under whose leadership ballistic and geophysical rockets, the first artificial satellite and Voskhod spacecraft were created, was a straight-C student in the school.

Sergei Korolev could receive the Nobel Prize twice :- first for the first artificial satellite of the Earth, then for the first ever Yuri Gagarin’s flight in the outer space. The Nobel Committee highly appreciated the merits of the Chief Designer, but his name was ignored, he even published articles in newspapers about the space achievements of the USSR under the pseudonym K. Sergeev. And when the Nobel Committee asked to name the designer, USSR president Khrushchev replied: “One person cannot be named, the whole team of people is the creator of new technology”.

Persistence is the key to success….

In the history of science, the classic example of industriousness is provided by the talented American scientist and experimenter Thomas Alva Edison. His devotion to the idea and extraordinary capacity for work made him an outstanding scientist. Right up to his death (at the age of 84), Edison worked intensively, often for 18-20 hours a day.

The secret of Edison's great scientific discoveries was work, persistence and more work. In order to find a suitable material for the filament of an electric light-bulb, Edison and his assistants carried out 6,000 experiments, filling 200 notebooks! And he found what he wanted. It turned out that carbonised bamboo fibres radiate evenly for a long time...

The great scientist Edison was fully justified in saying that genius consists of 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent hard work.

The Wright brothers spent years working on failed aircraft prototypes and incorporating their learnings until they finally got it right :- a plane that could get airborne and stay there. One might as well argue that the Wright brothers should have stopped after their first flight, as it only lasted 12 seconds in the air and covered only 120 feets or 36.5 metres. But they proved that it was possible to fly, and the duration of the flight was already a matter of technology. Indeed, four years later the Wright brothers supplied the US Army with an airplane capable of flying 125 miles.

Nikolai Vavilov is rightly ranked amongst such great natural scientists as Linnaeus, Darwin, Mendel, Morgan, and de Vries. The Soviet geneticist, agronomist, botanist, and geographer Nikolai Vavilov amassed a unique collection of agricultural seeds. Containing more than 300,000 items, Vavilov's gene bank remains a fund for developing new and productive varieties of plants.

The life of the outstanding Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943) is probably a good example of extremely high constant capacity for work. Vavilov never stopped working. He was the organiser first President of the USSR Academy of Agricultural Science, the director of the Institute of Plant-Growing and the Institute of Genetics, the president of the geographical society, the editor-in-chief of Works in Applied Botanics, Genetics and Selection, as well as of many collectively-written, sometimes multi-volumed collections.

Vavilov took all his duties seriously, showing an interest in all the details; particularly, as editor, he often reworked articles, together with their authors, several times, to make them brief and extremely clear and precise in their sense.

Academician Nikolai Vavilov, a scientist of world renown and an outstanding Soviet biologist, died of dystrophy. He was 55, and he had made a massive contribution to feeding the new Russia. Unfortunately, Nikolai Vavilov did not live to see the time when life itself rejected subjectivity in science and established scientific truth.

In a letter to a close friend Vavilov wrote: "I hung up 'David' and 'Moses' by Michelangelo in my study room, and when I have troubles, I always remember Michelangelo's biography, how he wrested marble from the Apennines, and suffered the pain of being an outcast and how he carved what had remained unsurpassed for centuries. One must go one's own way, be a hero, in spite of all obstacles.

It would seem that Vavilov left himself no time to write articles and monographs, but in fact he wrote a large number of major fundamental works, running to over 16,000 pages. Vavilov worked 18 to 20 hours a day and never took a holiday in his life. Yet he was never' heard to complain of being tired or to have underslept. During the day, he found time to answer a couple of dozen important business letters, hold two or three conferences, work in the laboratory and on experimental plots, and then to make a comprehensive report--and all this with joy, ease and interest.

The ten-year-old boy Schliemann promised himself that he would find and dig up the remnants of ancient city of Troy. And he devoted all his life to that task. And 39 years later when Schliemann was 49 years old, his dream turned into reality.

The search for the ancient city of Troy had never ceased for over thousands of years. But in all that time, no one had ever been able to prove that Homer’s saga of the Trojan War had actually occurred – until 1871, when Heinrich Schliemann, then 49-years-old, discovered the ruins of the city under the Hisarlik hill in the Troas region in the North-west of present-day Turkey. Schliemann had by no means been the first person to believe that the city described by Homer was hidden under this particular location.

As we can see, regardless of the field of the work and the scientist's personality, each of them is characterised by extreme persistence in his work, an ability to make rational use of time for scientific research. And it should be stressed that scientists share this feature, irrespective of the level of their natural talents.

Continuing, as it were, Edison's idea, the well-known Soviet physicist Academician Alexander Mints modestly noted on his 70^th  birthday: "To be quite honest, I must admit that the natural talents of the hero of this anniversary were hardly above average. His knowledge never sufficed. He worked hard all his life, making up for his lack of talents with persistent hard work." The outstanding results achieved by production workers undoubtedly depend, no less than in science, on the maximum development of human capabilities, connected with constant intensive work to improve and raise one's qualifications.

PERSISTENCE OF FARADAY

For ten years Faraday carries in his pocket a length of copper wire and a piece of magnetized iron. At the most inopportune moments , forgetting where and with whom he is, Faraday, like a maniac, produces his "toy" and begins arranging the wire and the magnet in various ways. From time to time he tries again to detect current with a galvanometer. But there is still none of it. And all these ten years the sixth sense of the scientist (or perhaps, the seventh or the one of a still higher order) continues to tell him that he is on the right path. Unbelievable persistence - to have faith for ten years in something that cannot be confirmed !! Success came unexpectedly. Once he connected a battery to a wire spirally wound on a drum and then suddenly perceived that a galvanometer connected to another isolated winding showed the presence of current for one tiny moment. A hardly noticeable spurt of the pointer and Faraday at once understood the thing that had eluded him for ten years. Current cannot be induced as long as the magnetic field is stationary. For current to appear, the field has to be varied. When Faraday had connected the battery, a magnetic field was immediately formed, and during the instant that it was building up, he accidentally noticed the slight abrupt deflection of the pointer. Was it so? Not much of an accident !! The search for this event had lasted for ten years !!

In an entry made in 1821 in his diary, Faraday set himself the task of converting magnetism into electricity. It took this great scientist ten years to achieve this aim. He had failed for so many years because he tried to obtain a current by placing a conductor in a constant field. But in 1831, his persistent efforts finally succeeded.

Mendel - a good example of persistence and perseverance

In 1856, Gregor Mendel began an extensive series of experiments upon culinary peas, with the aim of determining general laws governing the development of specific traits in hybrid species.

The monk Gregor Mendel studied peas in his tiny monastery garden, and, after precise experiments and calculations, laid the foundations for the new science of genetics which has had a tremendous effect on contemporary medicine. Gregor Mendel's discovery of basic hereditary principles was not realized until the early 20^th  century around 1900.

Three botanists - Hugo DeVries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak - independently rediscovered Mendel's work in the same year, a generation after Mendel published his papers.... They helped expand awareness of the Mendelian laws of inheritance in the scientific world.

So why were his results almost unknown until 1900 and the rediscovery of the laws of inheritance? The common assumption is that Mendel was a monk working alone in a scientifically isolated atmosphere. His work was ignored because it was not widely distributed, and he didn't make an effort to promote himself. When he presented his work to other scientists he did not communicate it well so they did not really understand it.

 Mendel a genius was a son of peasant.  T. H. Morgan  wrote that in the ten years that Mendel worked with his plants in the monastery garden he achieved the greatest discovery in biology in the past 500 years.

Persistence of pursuing interests

Little Carl was so fascinated by the plants that he grew that he neglected his homework and did not seek to master the school curriculum. The teachers noted :- the boy is certainly capable, but he does not want to study and will not, and therefore his future is sad. Linnaeus was lucky :- on his way he met a man who began to teach him on his own, which allowed Carl to enter the university. Since childhood, being fond of wildlife, Linnaeus devoted his whole life to the study of plants. The result was a classification system. The talented scientist became famous not only as the creator of a unified system of classification of flora and fauna, but, Linnaeus converted the Celsius scale. Before that, 100°C meant the freezing point, and 0°C boiling. After the death of Celsius, another great Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, “swapped” these values. Now everything is the opposite, and we owe this to the brilliant Swede Linnaeus.

Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius proposed his own scale in 1742, and the boiling point was taken as 0°C on it, and the freezing point of water was taken as 100°C. In the book of Carl Linnaeus, published in 1738, a drawing of a thermometer was placed, where 0°C is the freezing point of water. The scale, which for a long time was called Centigrade (in Latin “one hundred steps”, since there were exactly 100°C between the boiling and freezing points of water), in 1948 received the new international name is the “Celsius” scale. It is used all over the world, with the exception of the United States, UK and a few countries that still remain faithful to Fahrenheit.

MORE INSPIRATION

The creation and development of chemotherapeutic agents and, in particular, of organic arsenic compounds are associated with the name of the German chemist and biologist Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) He advanced the idea of obtaining chemical substances that would act selectively on microbes and at the same time would not harm the macroorganism. This is the essence of chemotherapeutics. In conducting his research in the field of organic arsenic compounds, he had to cover a lot of ground before he accomplished its synthesis.

Ehrlich prepared an enormous number of diverse arsenic compounds, but only preparation No. 606, which he named salvarsan, produced the desired physiological effect. Only on his six hundred and sixth attempts did Ehrlich obtain an effective remedy.

This substance selectively acted on microbes without harming a macroorganism. Salvarsan was even called “preparation-606” some time back. Later his preparation No. 914 was found to be still more valuable and powerful medicine. Ehrlich called it neosalvarsan. Salvarsan appeared to be an effective remedy against syphilis, a dangerous and highly contagious disease. By developing salvarsan and neosalvarsan, Ehrlich opened up the possibility for the further search for chemotherapeutic agents.

Danish writer and famous storyteller Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the son of a poor shoemaker who became an orphan at an early age, He began his schooling late in life. On October 26, 1822, at the age of 17, Hans Christian Andersen enrolled in school to get an education. And entered the university when he was twenty-three. Andersen owes his fame to his fairytales, which have been delighting children throughout the world for over a century.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), a wood-cutter who, years later, became a lawyer and then President of the United States. His main qualities were great energy, common sense, and courage.

In 1895, James Dewar in an interview with the London Times declared that he was on the verge of liquefying hydrogen. The very idea that this was possible was seriously doubted at the time. But in a few years Dewar did it.

Then what about Tsiolkovsky? Sometimes we forget how it happened that his works on astronautics found no practical application in his own time. Surely all the scientists, with only one small exception, could not have been so limited in outlook !! But be a rationalist and put yourself in their place. There was no material for the rocket casing and no fuel to power the rocket, apart from the fact that the basic problems of a rocket’s movement were still to be investigated. There was only the idea, a flash of genius – and the conviction that the idea would work.

Tsiolkovsky was the first man to envisage creation of multistage rockets for penetrating beyond the earth's atmosphere, and did valuable theoretical work to this end, back in 1911 when the project seemed to be totally in the province of science fiction writer Jules Verne.

Persistence here too....

The history of science knows of numerous attempts to produce diamonds artificially. (By the way, one of the first "fortune seekers" Henri Moissan, the first to isolate fluorine in the free state.) Not one of them was successful. Either the method was fundamentally wrong, or the experimenters did not have at their disposal equipment which could provide the combination of exceedingly high temperatures and pressures. Only in the middle fifties of 20^th century did modern engineering finally find the key to the problem of producing artificial diamonds. As might have been expected, the starting material was graphite. It was subjected simultaneously to a pressure of 100 thousand atmospheres and a temperature of about three thousand degrees. Now artificial diamonds are produced in many countries of the world.

Inspiration and a schoolchild

Success does not come at once. A hundred lessons aimed at encouraging the mind of a child may fail before you are rewarded at last with the first spark of curiosity in his eyes. Without those hundred unsuccessful lessons, however, there would not be the one that finally kindled the precious spark.