Everyone can be successful. Yes I know. Easier said than done, but throughout history, many of the great billionaires we know and see on television started from the bottom. Lower than lower. In full poverty and managed to build an empire. Of course, nothing is random and requires work and perseverance. But in this post we will show you four billionaires who started with nothing and today they have everything so you can see that if they could, you can too.
The key to success is work and perseverance, there are no lies in that. If one does not insist, it will be difficult to stand out and be the best at something. Much less to get to where the characters who will accompany us next arrived. That is why it is important to stop for a moment and think: What do we want to leave the world? What is the footprint that we want to mark? How do we want to be remembered? How do we want to live life? These are questions that are too philosophical but that have an end: to have a goal and strive to achieve it.
What do you know
From owners of the biggest entertainment venues, to clothing designers and a consecrated journalist from the United States. All the characters that we will mention below began with an austere life and today their heritage is one of the most envied in the world. Let’s find out who they were and who they are now:
Guy Laliberté
Do you recognize the name? He is the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, the largest theater production company in the world. It originally started in a hostel in Canada with the intention of bringing together traveling artists at a meeting point to spread art and culture in the town of Baie-Saint-Paul.
Guy was a street artist who specialized in playing the accordion and swallowing fire. The pretensions of Laliberté and his fellow founders was to set up a street theater group. When Canada marked the 450th anniversary of their discovery, the government granted them a million dollar loan to put on a show. They did not know that the success of this show would be such that to date they have performed shows for more than 180 million viewers around the world. And, in addition, it is the source of work for 4,000 people, including 1,300 artists from more than 50 different countries. Cirque du Soleil has also ventured into the world of film and television as the main mainstream platforms.
Laliberté today owns a net worth of $ 1.19 billion and started out as a street artist.
Oprah Winfrey
Journalist and host of her own show The Oprah Winfrey Show. Impossible not to recognize her, she created the most famous talk show in the world and was a multiple-time Emmy Award winner for her work as a host. She was also nominated for the Oscars and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, the highest decoration of this North American country.
Oprah Winfrey is considered the richest African American person of the 20th century and also the most powerful according to Forbes magazine. The recognitions are unnecessary. But not everything in life was successful for this great woman.
The daughter of a single mother immersed in poverty in rural Mississippi, she moved to the city of Milwaukee where she was a victim of rape and became pregnant at the age of fourteen with a baby who later died. Then he went to live in Tennessee where she got her first job at a local radio station. That was how she escalated until she started working on a Chicago talk show. Then everything was on the rise.
She participated in films such as The Color Purple, Beloved, The Great Debaters, The Princess and the Frog, The Butler and A Journey Through Time. In addition to having hosted her own show for over 25 years.
Her equity exceeds $2.5 billion dollars. She is continually donating significant amounts to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, a foundation she created to help educate low-income girls.
Jan Koum
This is a bit more difficult, you may not have it by name, but if you have downloaded WhatsApp on your cell phone, it is thanks to it. Jan Koum is the co-founder of the famous messaging app. But before he was, he had a career as an engineer at Yahoo.
Jan was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine until his mother decided to settle in California. At that time they required social assistance to get a place to live and vouchers to access an accessible plate of food. His first job was in a supermarket and when he discovered that his true interest was programming, he enrolled at San José State University.
The rest is history. Koum founded the WhatsApp app after buying his first iPhone and fantasizing about creating an app. Such was the success that Facebook decided to buy it for $ 19 billion.
Today he is CEO of WhatsApp and Managing Director at Facebook, Inc with a net worth of $ 9.8 billion.
Do Won Chang
Do you know the Forever 21 brand? Did you ever buy clothes there? If the answers are yes, it is thanks to Do Won Chang. Originally from South Korea, he emigrated to the United States in 1981 since in his native country he was not going through a time of prosperity, quite the opposite. In Forbes magazine, Do Won Chang tells that there were no possibilities to have a decent life in Korea.
They came to the United States in hopes of fulfilling the famous American dream. I was 22 at the time and had not one, not two, but three jobs. He washed dishes and served coffee in a cafeteria, worked at a gas station and cleaned an office at night. More than 19 working hours a day.
In Forbes, he says that in his work at the gas station, his clients were from the fashion industry. That was the seed that was planted and then it will germinate into what Forever 21 is today. After years of work, he managed to raise $ 11,000 that he used to open his first store called Fashion 21.
Such was the success that today they have more than 790 stores in 48 countries, creating a fashion empire. Today, Do Won Chang, has a net worth of 3.2 billion dollars.
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Conclusion
It takes commitment, perseverance, and faith to be successful. The great empires were not born in the cradle of gold, but rather began laying the foundations. You can cement the next ones. Discover what you are passionate about and go to the end. Remember, if they could, why couldn’t you?
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