How Successful People Spent Their Time When They Were Young

Believe it or not, most people find their purpose and passion in their thirties and forties. Studies show that significant life milestones previously reserved for twenty-somethings, such as marriage, buying a home and starting a family are now occurring much later in life.

However, that doesn’t mean that the teenagers and twenties aren’t important decades for personal and professional development. Instead, they are a time when character development occurs and choices set a course for the future.

For the millennial generation, it can feel almost impossible to stay fit and healthy, maintain a social life and have a career sorted by the time you hit your 20’s. It’s easy to look at the most successful people in the world and wonder how they got there. However, while some famous icons knew what they wanted to do and achieved success early on, others took a longer, more twisted journey to get to that point.

Here’s how successful people spent their time when they were young:

1. Bill Gates Was Busy Writing Computer Code

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discovered his love of computers at age 13 while at a prep school in Seattle. There, he wrote computer code for a version of tic-tac-toe, which was also where he met and went into business with Paul Allen. Paul was business partner and also the co-founder of Microsoft.

Gates attended Harvard University, but then dropped out at the age of 20 in 1975 to focus on Microsoft, which then made him into the world’s richest self-made billionaire.

2. Warren Buffett Was Rejected From Harvard

By the time the world’s most famous investor was 16, he had earned today’s equivalent of $53,000 (£41,000). One of Buffett’s first jobs was being a paperboy delivering “The Washington Post”. He also sold golf balls and stamps, buffed cars and set up pinball machines in barber shops.

He was rejected from Harvard Business School, but then attended Columbia Business School and worked as an investment salesman, securities analyst and stockbroker upon finishing his time at college.

3. Oprah Winfrey Worked For A Local Radio Station

Oprah Winfrey is now one of the most famous talk show hosts, actresses and producers in the world, but she realized she loved media at the age of 14 when she moved to Nashville. She found her first job at 16 as a broadcaster for WVOL, a Nashville radio station.

At age 19 as a sophomore at Tennessee State University, Winfrey left school to start her media career. However, she had a bumpy ride into fame after being fired from hosting the 6 p.m. news on Baltimore’s WJZ-TV in 1977.

4. Arianna Huffington Was President of The Cambridge Union

In her 20s, co-founder of The Huffington Post and businesswoman Arianna Huffington was studying economics at the University of Cambridge. There, she became the first foreign, and the third female, President of the Cambridge Union.

At age 21 she met British journalist Henry Bernard Levin while on a panel for a quiz show. He became her mentor while she wrote “The Female Woman,” which was published when she was 23. She and Levin then traveled the world for a few years together, attending music festivals.

5. Mark Zuckerberg Was Creating Computer Programs

Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg got into developing computer programs at a young age. At age 12, he used Atari BASIC (a programming language) to create a messaging program that he called “Zucknet.” In his early teens at high school, Zuckerberg built another program called Synapse, which learned your music taste.

Microsoft offered to buy it for $1 million (£772,857), but he declined the offer. In high school, he also learned to read Hebrew, Latin and Greek, before he was accepted into Harvard University. This is where Facebook was born after he was approached by the Winklevosse brothers, which Zuckerberg built in a week. He dropped out in his sophomore year to commit all his time to Facebook.

6. Richard Branson Started His First Business

Richard Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group, which owns over 200 companies in more than 30 countries worldwide. He started his first company when he was just 17 years old after dropping out of school at age 16.

He struggled with academia, but not with business as he founded a youth culture magazine known as “Student”, which sold $8,000 (£6,183) worth of advertising in its first edition. Two years later, Branson started selling records via mail, which turned into a record store, which then turned into a recording studio called Virgin Records.

7. Elon Musk Was Making Video Games

At age 12, the PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk had written code for a space-based video game called Blastar. In 2015, a software engineer at Google turned it into a working game, according to The Verge.

At age 17, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University but then moved to the University of Pennsylvania to study business and physics. After this, he pursued a PHD at Stanford University in energy physics, but he dropped out after just two days to become part of the “internet boom” in the 90s.

8. Barack Obama Went To Harvard Law School

The former president lived in Honolulu for most of his childhood. At school, he was skilled at basketball and graduated in 1979 at age 18 with academic honors. He was one of only three black students at the school, Punahou Academy, which is where he became particularly aware of racism and what it meant to be African American, according to numerous sources.

He then went to Harvard Law School and got his education there. Notably, he was the president of the Harvard Law Review and would eventually become the President of The United States of America.

Conclusion

Success does not happen in the blink of an eye, in a snap of your fingers or overnight. Success is hard work and sometimes your career path can be shaped during the early years of your life. In this post, I shared with you how successful people spent their time when they were young.