These 5 Incredible People Went from Broke to Billionaire

How Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, and others embody the American Dream

Creativity and ambition breed hope in the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs across America. These five incredible people embody the American Dream and though they came from humble beginnings, now rank among the wealthiest and most successful business people on the planet.

Howard Schultz Poured His Heart Into It

The son of a high school dropout and a truck driver, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz grew up in public housing in Brooklyn. He was encouraged from an early age to believe in his ability to succeed and ended up the first person in his family to go to college.

In his book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Schultz explained that he bartended, sold his blood, and took out loans to get himself through college. After stints selling kitchen equipment and housewares, Schultz took a marketing job with a little coffee store called Starbucks. He wanted to start a small espresso bar but was told "No," by his superiors, so he simply used their beans and started his own rival store. Two years later, in 1987, he bought Starbucks for $3.8 million. Their sales now top $15 billion a year.

Today, Schultz is widely recognized as a business savant and has a net worth of $2.2 billion, according to Forbes.

Oprah Winfrey Takes Control of Her Own Business Destiny

She leads the kind of glamorous life today that millions covet, but Oprah certainly knows hardship. A survivor of sexual assault and teen pregnancy, Oprah was raised by her teen single mom in poverty in 1950s and 1960s rural Mississippi.

At 32, Oprah landed her TV show, a spot she would go on to occupy for 25 years. It was her business and communications savvy that really elevated her to billionaire status, though. The massive success of her multimedia brand Harpo Productions and more recently, the Oprah Winfrey Network, made Oprah a force to be reckoned with not only with a microphone but also at the board table.

Currently, Oprah's net worth is an estimated $2.9 billion. Not bad for a young girl trying to find her way out of poverty in rural America.

Larry Ellison Beat the Odds in Every Way Imaginable

After a bout of pneumonia as a toddler, Larry Ellison left the young, single mother in New York who couldn't care for him, only to land in the care of a poor immigrant relative on Chicago's south side. According to Ellison's biography as written by Mike Wilson, his adopted father told Ellison he would never amount to anything.

After the death of his adoptive mother, Ellison left the University of Illinois in his second year without taking his final exams. He tried a term at the University of Chicago, but ended up moving to California. After a few false starts with other companies, Ellison and two partners founded Software Development Laboratories with combined personal investments of $2,000. In 1982, the company was renamed Oracle Systems Corporation after its main product, the Oracle database.

Today, Ellison's net worth is an estimated $51.5 billion and, at 70 years old, he shows no signs of retiring from his position as Oracle's CEO.

Jeff Bezos Shows Value of Youth Work Ethic

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had a modest upbringing. As a child, he worked hard on his grandfather's farm near Albuquerque, helping with chores like laying pipe and vaccinating cattle. In his teens, Bezos had a summer job at McDonald's, just a year before he really showed his entrepreneurial chops by launching a $600-per-child summer science camp.

Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986, but he didn't find his life's greatest success until he left a good hedge fund job and founded Amazon in 1994. Amazon exploded in the latter part of the first decade of the new millennium.

Though much of his wealth is tied up in his company's stock and declines this year have eaten into his net worth, as of April 2014, Bezos was still worth $29.7 billion.

Jan Koum and the American Dream

Ukrainian immigrant Jan Koum came to the United States at the age of 16 with his mother and grandmother. The little family settled in a small two-bedroom apartment in Mountain View, California, with the assistance of a social support program. Koum's mother babysat for a living while the teen worked at a grocery store.

Koum taught himself computer networking outside of his work hours, and this interest in programming took him to San Jose State University at 18. He worked as a security tester to help pay for his schooling and landed an infrastructure engineer position at Yahoo in 1997. Early in 2009, he and partner Brian Acton launched cross-platform mobile messaging app WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook this year for $19 billion.

Koum signed the papers for Facebook's acquisition of his company on the steps of the same welfare office he used to frequent for food stamps.

There's a common element in each of these success stories: entrepreneurial spirit. Whatever your station in life, know that great things are possible. These people who took themselves from broke to billionaire are living proof.

From Inc. Magazine

5 Steps to Building a Personal Brand (and Why You Need One)

People want to do business with other people, not with companies. Putting a strong personal brand on the frontline of your sales process can dramatically improve conversion rates.

Your company's brand is one of the most important factors for its eventual success. It's the culmination of your company's identity, packaged and presented in a way that's pleasing, familiar, and attractive to your prospective and recurring customers.

However, companies and organizations aren't alone in the need for solid branding. Personal branding, the art of building a unique brand around yourself as an individual, is just as important. Just as so with a traditional brand, personal branding requires you to find a signature image, a unique voice, and a recognizable standard that your readers, fans, and customers can grow to recognize.

Personal branding is becoming increasingly important because modern audiences tend to trust people more than corporations. Audiences are used to seeing advertising everywhere, and tend to believe corporations and organizations take actions and speak with only sales in mind. Personal branding allows you to establish a reputation and an identity while still maintaining a personal level of trust and interaction, usually through social media.

Furthermore, people want to do business with other people, not with companies. Putting a strong personal brand on the frontline of your sales process can dramatically improve conversion rates.

Whether you use your personal brand to consult, freelance, or drive more traffic and trust to your company, it's vitally important to establish one to stay competitive.

Step 1: Determine Your Area of Expertise

Before you can establish or develop your expertise, you have to decide what you want to be known for. The world of personal branding is flooded with competing entrepreneurs, so it isn't enough to choose a general field like "marketing" or "human resources." Instead, it's best to develop yourself in a very specific niche. With a niche focus, you'll have more opportunities to prove you know what you're talking about, and while your potential audience might be slightly smaller, it will also be that much more relevant. Specificity is a trade of volume for significance.

Step 2: Start Writing and Publishing

Once you know your area of focus, it's time to start building your reputation, and the best way to do that is to show off your expertise. Content marketing is the best way to build a brand and reputation online; when people look for information, they tend to go back to sources that were helpful to them. If you can become a trusted source of information through your content, over time you'll become collectively known as the expert of your specific field. It's best to start your own blog and update it on a regular (at least weekly) basis, but it's also a good idea to start guest blogging on other reputable blogs.

Step 3: Flesh Out Your Social Media Profiles

If content is the fuel for your personal brand, social media is the engine. Take the time to flesh out the details of your social media profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and make sure they're consistently in line with your personal brand standards. Post updates regularly (at least once a day for Facebook and LinkedIn, at least a few times a day for Twitter), and don't be afraid to re-post your older content for your new followers.

Step 4: Speak at Events and Develop Case Studies

If you're trying to win the business of your personal brand followers, it's a good idea to work up a few case studies. Work with your past or present clients and co-workers to spin and present a solid narrative. People love real stories more than promises or speculation, so prove what you've done by giving them digestible case studies. You should also consider looking for speaking events in your area, which will give you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise while connecting with new audiences.

Step 5: Network, Network, Network

On social media and in the real world, the key to sparking growth in your personal brand is networking. Engage with other individuals in your field, social influencers who have many connections, and anybody else who could be valuable in helping you spread the word about your expertise. Attend professional networking events to meet influencers in your area, and in the online world, engage in community discussions whenever you can. The more opportunities you have to meet people and talk, the better.

A personal brand is like a garden. Once you lay the groundwork and plant the seeds, you'll be in a great position to eventually reap the benefits. However, it still takes time and dedication to nurture and expand your creation. As you continue to develop your personal brand, stay consistent with your efforts, pay close attention to how your audience responds to your content, and hone your direction until your focus is razor sharp.

From Inc. Magazine

HOW TO FIGURE OUT IF YOU AND YOUR CAREER ARE MEANT TO BE

IF YOU'RE FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH THE CAREER YOU'VE CHOSEN, IT'S TIME TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR TRUE TALENTS AND APTITUDES.

I’m curious how many people in the corporate world these days are satisfied in their work. More importantly, I wonder if they feel that what they do for a living is a good fit for them. My hypothesis is that this number is much lower than it could be. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We choose careers for many reasons: Parental expectations, earning potential, cultural expectations, and the letters after the name, to name a few. Unfortunately, we don’t often choose based on innate talents and aptitudes.

FINDING YOUR NATURAL TALENTS

As it turns out, aptitudes, the things we learn easily and do well, are genetic. If we get them tested at 14 years of age or 80, the results will be the same. This means that if your work requires aptitudes that you don’t naturally have, then you most likely become easily frustrated in your job.

Of course you can adapt skills, and even be successful in forcing what is actually an unnatural talent, but something will feel off. Conversely, if you have high aptitudes that are not at play in your life or profession, you will have a sense of restlessness. High musical aptitudes are an excellent example of this. People with musical talent who aren’t working musicians are likely active with music outside of their occupation.

The first step in finding the best career fit is to get your aptitudes tested.

I’ve referred many people to the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, a nonprofit scientific research and education organization founded in 1922. They’re committed to studying human abilities and providing people with knowledge about their aptitudes that will help them in make decisions about school and work. I found the testing enlightening and have recommended it for years to friends and colleagues.

Next, ask yourself how well your current job matches your aptitudes. For the aptitudes in which you test high, are those skills being used regularly in your job? If not, you’re probably not very happy with your current state of work and that could be spilling over into the rest of your life.

Also ask yourself if every single one of your aptitudes is active in your life. And if not, what steps can you take to remedy that?

MOVING ON

It takes a lot of courage to admit that you don’t have the perfect professional marriage. It takes even more guts to do something about it. The only thing you have to gain by facing this is happiness and fulfillment, and perhaps a sense of adventure.

One of my clients, a well-respected IT executive, started to recognize some dissatisfaction with his role at work. Rather than give in and stay, he quit without even having a new job lined up. He got his aptitudes tested to help him in making his next career move, and to understand the dissatisfaction he felt in his last role.

As he told me, “Understanding my aptitudes gave me a new vocabulary for understanding myself.” This turned out to be a brilliant move by a brilliant person, as it opened up new life and work vistas. Suddenly, his world became a much bigger, more interesting place.

My own story had me headed from MBA school into the corporate world, where I wanted to be a big-company executive, even a CEO. Yet I kept finding myself in start-ups because the opportunities seemed interesting.

Then one day my “dream” came true: the start up I was with was bought by one of the biggest companies in the world and I became a VP before the age of 40. My star was on the rise. Yet the bigger my title and paycheck got, the smaller and smaller I felt. I had less of a sense of being where I needed to be.

So I quit.

I decided to have my aptitudes tested, and it turns out that two of my high aptitudes are in Divergent Thinking: the ability to generate ideas through many possible solutions, andForesight: the ability to envision future possibilities.

It turns out that many executives at large companies (the ones who enjoy it, anyway) are often low in these particular aptitudes as they are more often called on to implement current plans than to come up with new ones. It would have helped me to know that sooner. (By the way, those big company execs have their own set of high aptitudes that make them a good fit where they are).

We all have high aptitudes, every single one of us. Knowing and owning what we learn easily and do well-- and what we don’t--can help us on our way to designing fulfilling and meaningful work as part of a great life. It also helps us to uncover our unique gifts and talents that we have to offer the world. After all, there is no more important work than that.

From Fast Company

7 Ways Successful Entrepreneurs Think Differently From Everyone Else

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson poses with Green Man of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" aboard a Virgin America plane.

Building a company from the ground up requires a tremendous amount of confidence, creativity, motivation, and focus. It's the reason why not everyone can make it as an entrepreneur.

We took a look at the Quora thread "What are some of the habits entrepreneurs have that other people don't?" and highlighted some of the best answers from those who have firsthand experience.

Here are some of the ways they see the world differently from the average person:

1. They see money as a way to make more money.

When most people come into money, whether it's by winning the lottery or receiving a bonus, their first impulse is to spend it on something frivolous like a new car. When entrepreneurs receive an influx of money, they find a smart way to invest it in a business opportunity that can yield an even higher return. This self-restraint becomes a habit.

"Well after they've made a fortune, most self-made wealthy people remain comparatively frugal; their lifestyles may be lavish, but they're almost always spending much less than they earn," says Oliver Emberton, founder of British software company Silktide.

2. They have an ability to become intensely focused.

"Time and our attention are the only truly finite constraints — incalculably precious and easily squandered. Successful entrepreneurs are absurdly conscious of the fact, and tend to become highly organized, intolerant of inefficiency and laser focused," Emberton says.

That intense focus is often given as the reason why there are plenty of anecdotes about legendary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk occasionally being difficult to work with.

3. They manage to be positive realists.

"To make smart gambles — and that's what becoming rich entails — you need an honest appreciation of odds that few possess," Emberton says. Successful entrepreneurs tend not to be too pessimistic or too optimistic.

They're able to understand that for a large number of reasons their venture can collapse entirely and can adequately prepare, but they also have enough idealism to take big risks in the first place.

4. They see obstacles as opportunities.

Average people see difficulty as a chance to give up, says San Francisco-based entrepreneur Andrei Kolodovski, but entrepreneurs see unexpected challenges as a way to make their companies even stronger.

Thomas Edison perfectly illustrated this when he used the accidental destruction of his production plant in 1914 as a way to rebuild his business in a streamlined way and get his team to work harder and more efficiently. Within a year, his company had not only recovered, but was bringing in more revenue than ever before.

5. They focus on opportunity cost.

Entrepreneurs make every decision by comparing options and seeing which one will yield the most value.

"Whatever they do, they make sure the value created is larger than the cost of resources used," Kolodovski says. "Regular people tend to focus on expenses. Remember those driving around parking lots for 30 minutes just to save five minutes of walking?"

6. They think of ideas beyond their capabilities.

True entrepreneurs are always thinking about growth opportunities, Kolodovski says.

Rather than acting practically and working within their comfort zones, they push themselves into situations that will require them to stretch their skills and force them to recruit more talent to turn their aspirations into reality.

7. They have vision.

Entrepreneurs are driven by the idea that they have the solution to a certain problem, and that they need to lead the charge to implement it. And they do it without fear of being mocked or rejected for trying things differently.

"Entrepreneurs see something that needs to get done... a product that must be offered... a problem that must be solved... and they feel so deeply about these that they can face the opposition when starting a business," says Finnish entrepreneur Gerard Danford.

From Business Insider

10 Startup Tips Learned the Hard Way

We’ve learned quite a lot from our humble kitchen table beginnings since 2009, when we founded Fueled. Our now global, award-winning mobile-design and development agency has offices in New York, London and Chicago, with more on the way.

While we’ve hit some bumps along the ride, we’ve learned from them, adapted and worked out how to build Fueled into a thriving agency. We’ve come up with a ton of pro tips along the way. Here are 10 of them.

1. Brand with a single purpose. From day one, we branded Fueled as mobile first and only, and we’ve ridden the wave of mobile’s dominance ever since. We’re grateful to receive the bulk of our new business through client referrals and friends. We do more than mobile apps -- website design, branding, SEO, community building -- but it’s our mobile brand and expertise that gets people in the door.

2. Fire fast. If someone on your team is not working out, part ways now. It might leave the team crunched and you might have to work on Saturday and Sunday. Suck it up and do it. You’ll thank us later.

When we hire someone, we tell them up front that it’s for a three-month trial period. At two months, we have a check-in and assess the relationship from both sides. This gives them a month to improve or keep on keeping on. If major issues remain unsolved by the end of that three months, we say goodbye. When something is not working out, it’s a mutual feeling more often than not.

3. Only charge flat fees for very discrete deliverables. Hourly rates or project fees? We finally found the perfect balance: charge flat fees for a series of well-defined, discrete deliverables with clear, inelastic boundaries.

Once a project is rolling, we move to a structure with a flat fee for a set amount of work. For us, that usually means a build of an app with a certain set of features. Clients know what they’re paying, and we know what we’re delivering. If the client adds features, we layer on more deliverables and flat fees.

4. Get paid up front. Don’t start working until you get paid up front. Seriously, stop. Do something else until you get the money.

It may feel cheeky, but there’s no faster way for an agency to fold than to carry the debt of your clients’ unpaid bills. We ask our clients to pay in advance for each two-week period of work. If they don’t pay, we don’t work.

5. Avoid cheap clients. If a potential new client tries to lowball you or asks for deep discounts, shut the door.

It’s this weird, inverted ratio: the law of discounting. The deeper the discount or the more generous the favor we give, the more unrealistic clients’ demands will be. For some reason, the clients who demand discounts will never be happy with your work, and they’re hardly worth your time and aggravation.

6. Build a lean product. Bully your clients into building less, not more. Some clients are surprised when we push for a smaller contract (which means less cash for us). But experience has taught us that six-month builds of apps with 150 screens is effectively a guaranteed disaster. Focus first on what you can build in eight weeks, max. Then add and release the most compelling additional features in one- or two-week increments.

7. Have plenty of conference rooms and phone booths. Remember this ratio: one to 11. Fueled runs and houses its NYC team in The Fueled Collective, a coworking space with 150 members and 35 startups. We’ve found that the magic ratio of conference rooms to people is 1 to 11.

Spacious conference rooms for five to eight people are great, but the number-one use of conference-room time is phone calls made by one or two members, so to be efficient with space, try creating phone booths or micro-conference rooms. A few nooks for impromptu breakouts is also very useful.

8. Managing the client and managing the process are two different jobs. When we started out, we had “producers,” managers who handled both client relations, project management and the actual product. We’ve since learned that people are either really good at building product or really good at managing the client relationship, never both.

Now we have separate project managers and product managers. The tension between their different skills and priorities creates a healthy conflict that gets a quality product delivered on-time and on-budget.

9. Experience is valuable. Particularly in the tech world, the value of experience is easy to overlook. We had a bias, when we started, toward young talent rather than experience. We’ll just train them, we thought.

But we’ve since learned that experience matters massively. Bringing in seasoned talent and managers is absolutely critical to our success and happiness, and it’s been worth every extra penny.

10. Think before sleeping with your co-workers. Talented, creative human beings doing exciting work in intense environments? Love and other pangs of the heart will happen.

But think about it carefully before you give in to the longings of your loins. Just how awkward is it going to be if things don’t work out? How much time and effort are you going to spend making it right? Do you risk losing someone valuable to your company?

It might also make sense to set expectations up front, about what the consequences might be if things don’t work out. Basically, take the time to consider the consequences before hooking up with your hot colleague.

We hope these pro tips help you level-up your own agency’s game. But whatever you do, don’t stop experimenting and learning as you go. We got to where we are through constantly tweaking and iterating on how we do business.

Ultimately, our passion for experimentation and pushing the boundaries has been core to Fueled’s success.

From Entrepreneur

Focus on What Works and You Start Solving Problems

When things are dark, smart leaders find the bright exceptions and learn from them

When I was growing up, my mom had a ritual. Every night at dinner, despite the real challenges we were facing as a family, she would look around the table at her six kids and say, “Tell me something good that happened today.” As simple as those words are, they changed the energy in the room. Instead of harping on the dysfunction in our home, we were connecting and laughing and acting like a family. Wow Mom, how’d you do that?

Some business leaders pride themselves on creating cultures of “joy” or “happiness.” That’s a beautiful goal; occasionally it’s a beautiful reality. At Life is good, we strive for a culture of optimism, which is a little different. We know that every day is not going to be perfect or easy. In life and in businesses, there are real challenges. As optimists, we model ourselves on my mom at the dinner table. We start by focusing on what’s good and build from there.

Years ago I read an article about something called “positive deviance.” It told the story of a couple working for Save the Children in Vietnam, trying to combat malnutrition. The assumption was they’d figure out ways to bring in more food. But this couple took a different approach: They went into villages looking for families that had somehow avoided malnutrition. Those relative success stories, they learned, were the result of people bucking conventional wisdom. For example, they gave children shellfish and sweet-potato greens, which were readily available but considered indigestible by the young. They also continued feeding children who had diarrhea, a practice criticized in that country as a waste of nutrients. Such practices deviated from the norm. And in deviating from the norm, they produced positive outcomes. The lesson was this: Focus on what’s broken and it can consume you. Focus on what works and you begin to build solutions.

Searching out positive deviance is an act of optimism. Unfortunately, when things go wrong in a business, leadership often locks onto what you might call the “negative norm.” Say a company has 20 sales reps, and 18 of them are sucking wind. Managers descend on those 18 territories looking for the culprit. They want to know, “Should we shut down this product line? Should we fire these people?” The business world loves “trouble-shooters.” But if the goal is to shoot trouble, all you’re left with is stuff that’s dead.

Optimistic leadership would concentrate on those two territories where things are working well--the positive deviants. Find out why those people are hitting it out of the park. Then send them on a tour of the other territories to educate their struggling colleagues.

That’s not to say you should ignore your weaknesses. Rational optimists acknowledge when the organization is falling short, especially when they’re part of the problem.

Four years ago, during the recession, Life is good shrank for the first time in our 20-year history. We couldn’t wait around for a reviving economy to save us. That would have been “blind” optimism, the only kind of optimism not practiced here.

My brother John and I suspected that one key issue was a lack of clarity from leadership, beginning with us. (John is my co-founder and Life is good’s chief creative optimist.) So we formed a six-member task force charged with getting to the root of things. The team’s report exposed a lot, including a lack of alignment between John and me. We were making people’s jobs harder, and they didn’t know how to talk to us about it.

It was a difficult experience, and yet the solution was deeply rooted in optimism. The message we wanted to convey to our people was, “We know we can get better. We trust you to tell us how.” And they did tell us. We took a step back and began to see our efforts objectively. And we got better. We hashed out some differences, clarified roles and structure, and made ongoing dialogue a larger part of the process. Now we know how to empower healthy criticism in a culture of optimism.

Soon after that, we saw our sell-through at retail begin to climb back. We had enabled our staff to accurately assess the obstacles, and then we all poured our resources into the opportunities. Boom!

From Inc. Magazine

6 Things Mark Cuban Says You Need to Be Great in Business

There are no shortcuts in business. In order to be successful there are some things that you must know. These are not all of them by a long shot, but in my humble opinion, they are six of the most important:

1. Know how to sell.

Selling means being able to convey why your product or service, which may be you if you are looking for a job,  will make things better. Selling is never about convincing. It is always about helping.

2. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer.

If you know how to put the person you are dealing with in a position to succeed, you can be successful. In order to do this, you must be able to quickly understand the needs and demands of that person and those of the company(s) they work for or with. Every person and industry is different. This is something that comes from investing incredible amounts of time to understand different industries , businesses, roles, and what has made them work and not work.

It is a never-ending process of learning about what companies need. What people in those companies need and how they work. If you don’t understand what it takes to make the people and companies you work with better, you don’t understand how to be successful.

3. Know as much as you can about technology.

The beautiful thing about technology is that it changes every day. Look at any tech you can see today or have ever seen. Any tech you have read about. It was invented by someone. They know the product better than everyone. On the day that it is released, you are as knowledgeable about that  technology as anyone else in the world. From there its just about effort to keep learning.

If you are one of the few people that know the new technologies, you are in a unique position to put yourself in the shoes of your customer(s) and determine if the new technology can be of benefit. New technologies enable change and where there is change there is opportunity.  Its up to you to figure out  what that opportunity is.

4. Always ask how you would design a solution if no current solution existed.

Know this: 99.99 percent of the things we do in business are being done the way they have always been done. No one has re-imagined how things should be done. That is what successful people do. Every situation they are in they take their knowledge of the business or situation they are visiting, whether its buying a deck of playing cards, eating at a restaurant or trying to solve a problem and think about how to re invent it. They don't ask people what they would want. They envision a complete reapplication. Then they decide what to do with what they just recreated.

5. Is it the path of least resistance to something better.

Lots of people come up with ways of doing things that they think are great/amazing. What they fail to ask is whether it will make anyone else’s life better or easier. The simple test of any imagineering of a process or situation is simple. Is this the path of resistance  to a better place for the user? Yes or No.

6. Be nice. 

People hate dealing with people who are jerks. It’s always easier to be nice than to be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.

From Entrepreneur