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What Extremely Successful People Were Doing At Age 25

Marissa Mayer had just started her job as Google's 20th employee.

World Economic Forum

At 24, Mayer became employee number 20 at Google and the company's first female engineer.
She remained with the company for 13 years before moving on to her role as CEO of Yahoo.

Google didn't have the sorts of lavish campuses it does now, Mayer said in an interview with VMakers,
"During my interviews, which were in April of 1999, Google was a seven-person company.
I arrived and I was interviewed at a ping pong table which was also the company's conference table,
and it was right when they were pitching for venture capitalist money, so actually after my interview Larry
and Sergei left and took the entire office with them."

Since everyone in the office interviewed you those days, Mayer had to come back the next day for another
round.

Martha Stewart was a stockbroker for the firm of Monness, Williams, and Sidel, the original
Oppenheimer & Co.

Courtesy Martha Stewart

Before her name was known by every American household, Martha Stewart actually worked on
Wall Street for five years as a stockbroker. Before that, she was a model, booking clients from 
Unilever to Chanel.

"There were very few women at the time on Wall Street … and people talked about this glass ceiling, which
I never even thought about," Stewart said in an interview with PBS' MAKERS series. "I never considered
myself an unequal and I think I got a very good education being a stockbroker."

In 1972, Stewart left Wall Street to be a stay-at-home mom. A year later, she started a catering business.

Mark Cuban was a bartender in Dallas.

AP Images

At age 25, Cuban had graduated from Indiana University and had moved to Dallas. He started out as a
bartender, then a salesperson for a PC software retailer. He actually got fired because he wanted to go close
a deal rather than open a store in the morning. That helped inspire him to open his first business, MicroSolutions.

“When I got to Dallas, I was struggling — sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom
apartment,” Cuban writes in his book “How to Win at the Sport of Business.” “I used to drive around, look at
the big houses, and imagine what it would be like to live there and use that as motivation.”

Lloyd Blankfein was an unhappy lawyer.

Getty Images

Blankfein didn't take the typical route to finance. He actually started out as a lawyer. He got his law degree
from Harvard at age 24, then took a job as an associate at law firm Donovan Leisure.

"I was as provincial as you could be, albeit from Brooklyn, the province of Brooklyn," Blankfein told William
Cohen at Fortune Magazine.

At the time, he was a heavy smoker and occasional gambler. Despite the fact that he was on the partner track
at the firm, he decided to switch to investment banking, joining J. Aron at the age of 27.

Ralph Lauren was a sales assistant at Brooks Brothers.

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He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, New York, but changed his name at the age of 15. He went on to
study business at Baruch College and served in the Army until the age of 24 when he left to work for Brooks
Brothers.

At 26, Lauren decided to design a wide European-styled tie, which eventually led to an opportunity with
Neiman Marcus. The next year, he launched the label "Polo."

JK Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series on a train.

WikiMedia Commons

In 1990, Rowling was 25 years old when she came up with the idea for Harry Potter duirng a delayed four-hour
train ride.

She started writing the first book that evening, but it took her years to actually finish it. While working as a 
secretary for the London office of Amnesty International, Rowling was fired for daydreaming too much about
Harry Potter and her severance check would help her focus on writing for the next few years.

During these years, she got married, had a daughter, got divorced, and was diagnosed with clinical depression
before finally finishing the book in 1995. It was published in 1997

Warren Buffett was working as an investment salesman in Omaha.

BloombergTV

In his early 20s, Buffett worked as an investment salesman for Buffett-Falk & Co. in Omaha before moving to
New York to be a securities analyst at age 26. During that year, he started Buffett Partnership, Ltd., an
investment partnership in Omaha.

New York just wasn't for him, Buffett told NBC. "In some places it's easy to lose perspective. But I think
it's very easy to keep perspective in a place like Omaha."

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million
users.

Mark Zuckerberg had been hard at work on Facebook for five years by the time he hit age 25. In that year — 2009 — the company turned cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users. He was excited at the time, but said it was just the start, writing on Facebook that "the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone."

The next year, he was named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz hadn't even started out in the coffee business; he
was a Xerox salesman.

YouTube

After graduating fromNorthern Michigan University, Schultz worked as a salesman for Xerox. His success there led a Swedish company named Hammerplast that made coffeemakers to recruit him at age 26.

While working for that company, he encountered the first Starbucks outlets in Seattle, and went on to join the company at age 29. 

On his job in Xerox, Schultz writes in "Pour Your Heart Into It": "I learned more there than in college about the worlds of work and business. They trained me in sales, marketing, and presentation skills, and I walked out with a healthy sense of self-esteem. Xerox was a blue-chip pedigree company, and I got a lot of respect when I told others who my employer was ... But I can't say I ever developed a passion for word processors."  

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Avoid Getting Fooled Into a Bad Job by Asking These Questions

If your job sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it, you may be tempted to look for another one. Be careful: remember job interviews are sales pitches as well as candidate evaluations, and all that glitters may not be gold. Here are some ways to cut through the pitch and find out if you're walking into a situation that may be as crappy as your last one.

We've mentioned before that job interviews are an opportunity for a potential employer to learn more about you, but also for you to learn about the company. The trouble is that they're also a sales pitch: you pitch yourself and your skills to the company, and the company pitches itself to you in the best possible light. It's not uncommon to interview for a job, think everything is great, and work there for a few weeks only to find out you're expected to travel more than you thought, or the hours are much longer than advertised, or your boss is nothing like he or she was in the interview.

You don't have to be fooled though; a couple of pointed questions during the interview will help cut through the fog. Over at On Careers, they suggest a few interview questions you may want to ask (if the position you're applying for warrants them):

Factual

• What is the turnover rate for this position?
• Do you have any statistics regarding employee engagement? (Some companies do surveys.)
• Can I see the full, official job description?
• Who will I be working with most and can I meet them?

Perception-based

• Can you tell me about the company culture?
• Can you tell me about the dynamics of the team I'll be working with?

Some of these may be a bit more direct than you want to be, and some hiring managers may not have the data on hand that you're looking for, but it's safe to ask about things like turnover, to see the full job description, and even what the person who was doing the job you're applying for is doing now (eg, whether they quit or got promoted.)

Similarly, asking about the company culture and how well the team you work with likes each other and gets along with one another are great ways to determine whether you'll be working with a tight-knit team that actually enjoys one another's company or an adversarial set of colleagues who can barely stand one another. Also, research the company a bit on the web and see if you can find testimonials from old employees on sites like Glassdoor. That information can go a long way to help you make a smart decision if you're offered a job.

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Top 5 Business Books of 2012

The best (and bestselling) business books of this year were mostly about exposing corruption.

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Through most of the past decade, the most popular business books were "How I Did It" autobiographies of successful big-company CEOs, like Jack Welch's Winning. But that's no longer true.

Rather than seeing big companies (especially in the financial industry) as percolators and role models, business readers now tend to view such firms as corrupt and parasitical, along with the people who run them.

As a result, 2012 was the year of the exposé. Here are the best five of the year, IMHO.

Twilight of the Elites

In this book, author Christopher Hayes attacks what's arguably the most persistent myth in the business world: that the workplace is a meritocracy. Using examples from business, politics, and sports, he shows how and why power and privilege entrenches itself, locking out innovation and new talent.

• Full Title: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
• Author: Christopher Hayes
• Publisher: Crown

Exposure

This fascinating document shows how even a CEO can run up against corruption and incompetence. In most cases, CEOs play along until they can leave with a big severance package. By contrast, the erstwhile CEO of Olympus went public with his experiences, providing a fascinating view of corporate politics at its very worst.

• Full Title: Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower
• Author: Michael Woodford
• Publisher: Porfolio Hardcover

The Payoff

You'd think that after destroying the world's economy with dodgy trades and double-dealing, at least somebody (other than the taxpayer) who was responsible might get thrown in jail. But you'd think wrong because Wall Street essentially "owns" both political parties, thereby making accountability impossible.

• Full Title: The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins
• Author: Jeff Connaughton
• Publisher: Prospecta Press

Why I Left Goldman Sachs

I remember reading the author's op-ed in the New York Times and thinking "This guy just wrote his career obituary." Fortunately for him, his follow-up book about his experience has become a bestseller, and rightly so. His anecdotes illustrate a world that's as different from the world of small business as the surface of Mars.

• Full Title: Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story
• Author: Greg Smith
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Bailout

This book brings the perspective of a lawyer and prosecutor to the challenge of holding financial executives responsible for the economic meltdown of 2008. He explains exactly how the Obama administration helped bankers game the system and make huge profits (with no risk) at the expense of the taxpaying public.

• Full Title:Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

• 
  Author: Neil Barofsky
• Publisher: Free Press

How a Leader Should View Power

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The Conscious Lifestyle: How a Leader Should View Power

March 08, 2013   

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(In this series of posts we're discussing the qualities of leadership using the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S. The fifth letter, "E," stands for empowerment.)

Power is so tempting and so controversial, connected at its worst with corruption and runaway ego, that I'd like to state some general principles first as they pertain to a conscious leader.

Empowerment is the fruit of successful action. Doing and power go together, since without the power to sustain your vision through difficulties and resistance, your vision will wither away. This isn’t ego empowerment, which is driven by the demands of I, me, and mine: – as a successful leader, you are empowering others at the same time as you empower yourself.

The belief that power isn’t compatible with ethics, morality, and spirituality is misguided. At the deepest source of consciousness, there is a field of infinite possibilities. Packaged with every possibility is the path to achievement. Both unfold from the same place at the same time. Your power is validated by how smoothly you can manifest your goal, with minimal resistance, struggle, and opposition.

There is a dark side to power, however, known as the shadow. This is where anger, fear, envy, greed, and aggression create problems for anyone in power, warping their good intentions and tarnishing their ideals. You must be aware of your shadow, and then you can defuse it by integrating the dark into the light. When the war between the dark and light side of power is transcended, you find yourself wielding the power of wholeness.

I realize that these principles sound abstract and perhaps foreign, since the usual model of power is a sliding scale from zero power to total power. The helpless and impoverished are at zero; absolute dictators are at total. But there is no sliding scale for inner power - Socrates and Saint Francis exerted tremendous power over the future without any basis in material power, but who remembers the name of the richest man in Greece or Italy during their lifetime?

A good model for present-day empowerment might be Warren Buffett, who exemplifies the principles of inner power as a guide.

Buffett:

• Saw his main strength early (a talent for asset management) and kept on building it.
• Remained connected to the support of family and community.
• Obtained a modest home and maintained a simple personal lifestyle - in other words, he didn't measure his power by outward trappings.
• Worked for the benefit of his whole team and investors who depended upon him.
• Has been humble in the face of enormous success.
• Measures his life by the standard of personal happiness and satisfaction.
• Does his business scrupulously and with complete transparency to his investors.

Comparison with the fallen and disgraced captains of Wall Street's great investment banks shows that Buffett’s way is superior by any measure, including his reputation and public image as well as material success. But you don't have to aim for billions to empower yourself using the same principles. 

Photo: luxorphoto/Shutterstock