People who succeeded despite adversity, part 4
[This post is part of a series on people who succeed despite adversity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]
More inspiration, continuing my series on people who succeeded adversity…
| Person | Achievement | Adversity |
|---|---|---|
| Auguste Rodin | Generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern era. He freed sculpture from the repetition of traditional patterns, providing the foundation for greater experimentation in the 20th century. His popularity is ascribed to his emotion-laden representations of ordinary men and women – to his ability to find the beauty and pathos in the human animal. His most popular works, such as The Kiss and The Thinker, are widely used outside the fine arts as symbols of human emotion and character. | Rejected three times from Paris’s foremost school of art. Hi earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments. |
| Marie Curie | The first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris. Created a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world’s first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centers of medical research today. During World War I, she established the first military field radiological centers. |
On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes, condemning her family to a difficult struggle. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was ten. After a collapse, possibly due to depression, she spent the following year in the countryside with relatives of her father. Most of all, she couldn’t enroll in a regular institution of higher education as a woman. |
| Jim Carrey | Carrey has received four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning two. Known for his highly energetic slapstick performances, he has been described as one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood. He starred in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my favorite movies. | Â “My father was a musician who got a ‘regular job’ to support his children. When he lost his job that’s when everything fell apart. We went from ‘lower middle class’ to ‘poor’. We were living out of a van. I quit school at age 15 to begin working to help support my family as a janitor. I’d have a baseball bat on my janitor cart because I was so angry I just wanted to beat the heck out of something.” He never finished high school because he worked full-time to help his family survive the severe economic hardship, and also helped care for his mother who battled a severe, chronic illness. He has ADHD and stated that he battled depression. |
| Stephen King | His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many adapted into feature films, television movies and comic books. King has published fifty novels and five non-fiction books. He has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and British Fantasy Society Awards, a Nebula Award novelette nominee,[3] and the O. Henry Award. The National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has also received the World Fantasy Award for Life, the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America | When King was two years old, his father left the family under the pretense of “going to buy a pack of cigarettes”, leaving his mother to raise King and his adopted older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend’s death. He was hit by a minivan and suffered a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip. His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg, but stabilized the bones in the leg with an external fixator. King’s alcohol and drug addictions were so serious during the 1980s that, as he acknowledged in On Writing in 2000, he can barely remember writing Cujo. Shortly after the novel’s publication, King’s family and friends staged an intervention, dumping on the rug in front of him evidence of his addictions taken from his office including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, dextromethorphan (cough medicine) and marijuana. As King related in his memoir, he then sought help, quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since. |
| According to the Forbes 2012 list of billionaires, Branson is the sixth richest citizen of the United Kingdom, with an estimated net worth of US$4.6 billion. He has been awarded numerous awards including appearing at No. 85 on the 2002 list of “100 Greatest Britons” (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public). Branson was also ranked in 2007’s Time Magazine “Top 100 Most Influential People in the World”. | Branson had dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student, but later discovered his ability to connect with others. On one of Branson’s last days at school, his headmaster told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. | |
| Â Shakira | Shakira has won five MTV Video Music Awards, two Grammy Awards, eight Latin Grammy Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards, twenty-eight Billboard Latin Music Awards and has been Golden Globe-nominated. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and she is one of the best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 125 milion records including 70 million albums worldwide Outside of her work in the music industry, Shakira is also involved in philanthropic activities through charity work and benefit concerts, notably her Pies Descalzos Foundation, her performance at the “Clinton Global Initiative” created by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and her invitation to the Oval Office by President Barack Obama in February 2010 to discuss early childhood development. In 2013, Shakira was listed on Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. | She was rejected for the school choir because her vibrato was too strong. The music teacher told her that she sounded “like a goat” |
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