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[local]1[/local]10 个人物素材
1海伦·凯勒 2贝多芬 3南丁格尔 4亨利.福特 5乔丹 6邱吉尔 7乔治·索罗斯 8爱因斯坦 9沃伦·巴菲特 10 金·凯利
1 Helen Keller
In 1882 a baby girl caught a fever that was so fierce she nearly died. She survived but the fever left its mark - she could no longer see or hear. Because she could not hear she also found it very difficult to speak.
So how did this child, blinded and deafened at 19 months old, grow up to become a world-famous author and public speaker?
The fever cut her off from the outside world, depriving her of sight and sound. It was as if she had been thrown into a dark prison cell from which there could be no release.
Luckily Helen was not someone who gave up easily. Soon she began to explore the world by using her other senses. She followed her mother wherever she went, hanging onto her skirts; she touched and smelled everything she came across. She copied their actions and was soon able to do certain jobs herself, like milking the cows or kneading dough, she even learnt to recognize people by feeling their faces or their clothes. She could also tell where she was in the garden by the smell of the different plants and the feel of the ground under her feet.
By the age of seven she had invented over 60 different signs by which she could talk to her family, if she wanted bread for example, she would pretend to cut a loaf and butter the slices. If she wanted ice cream she wrapped her arms around herself and pretended to shiver.
Helen was unusual in that she was extremely intelligent and also remarkably sensitive. By her own efforts she had managed to make some sense of an alien and confusing world. But even so she had limitations.
At the age of five Helen began to realize she was different from other people. She noticed that her family did not use signs like she did but talked with their mouths. Sometimes she stood between two people and touched their lips. She could not understand what they said and she could not make any meaningful sounds herself. She wanted to talk but no matter how she tried she could not make herself understood. This makes her so angry that she used to hurl herself around the room, kicking and screaming in frustration.
As she got older her frustration grew and her rages became worse and worse. She became wild and unruly. If she didn't get what she wanted she would throw tantrums until her family gave in. Her favorite tricks included grabbing other people's food from their plates and hurling fragile objects to the floor. Once she even managed to lock her mother into the pantry. Eventually it became clear that something had to be done. So, just before her seventh birthday, the family hired a private tutor - Anne Sullivan.
Anne was careful to teach Helen especially those subjects in which she was interested. As a result Helen became gentler and she soon learnt to read and write in Braille. She also learnt to read people's lips by pressing her finger-tips against them and feeling the movement and vibrations. This method is called Tadoma and it is a skill that very, very few people manage to acquire. She also learnt to speak, a major achievement for someone who could not hear at all.
Helen proved to be a remarkable scholar, graduating with honors from Radcliff College in 1904. She had phenomenal powers of concentration and memory, as well as a dogged determination to succeed. While she was still at college she wrote 'The Story of My Life'. This was an immediate success and earned her enough money to buy her own house.
She toured the country, giving lecture after lecture. Many books were written about her and several plays and films were made about her life. Eventually she became so famous that she was invited abroad and received many honors from foreign universities and monarchs. In 1932 she became a vice-president of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the United Kingdom.
After her death in 1968 an organization was set up in her name to combat blindness in the developing world. Today that agency, Helen Keller International, is one of the biggest organizations working with blind people overseas.
2 BEETHOVEN
Beethoven probably began to go deaf after what he called his ‘terrible typhus’ of 1797, but he tried to keep it a secret, while consulting doctors and trying various remedies, such as the application of almond oil. He was extremely anxious about its possible effect on his career as a musician, and embarrassed by its effect on his social life.
In the summer of 1801 he wrote to tow friends. To Franz Wegeler in Bonn he wrote that he was very busy, with more commissions than he could cope with,and publishers competing to get hold of his latest works, but he was worried about his health, and particularly about his gradual loss of hearing. He had been leading a miserable life for the previous two years because of his deafness, and had avoided human company because he found it hard to tell people that he was deaf. He would always say, “I live entirely in my music.”
Two days later he wrote to Karl Amenda, a more recent friend. On the same lines, expressing the anxiety that his best years would pass “without my being able to achieve all that my talent and my strength have commanded me to do.” His fear that his deafness would prevent him from realizing his artistic potential led him to contemplate taking his own artistic life, but in the so-called ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, addressed to his brothers and found among his papers after his death, which he wrote in the depths of despair in October 1802, he said that he had rejected suicide, and was resigned to his condition. He explained that his deafness was the reason why he had been withdrawing from people’s company, because he found it so humiliating not being able to hear, but he did not want to tell people about it. Although tempted to kill himself, “the only thing that held me back was my art. For indeed it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose.”
During the summer of 1802 he had spent six months in Heiligenstadt, thirteen miles outside Vienna, on the advice of one of his doctors who thought that his hearing might improve in the peace and quiet away from Vienna. But his pupil, Ferdinand Ries (son of the leader of the Bonn court orchestra) visited him in the summer, and during a walk in the summer, and during a walk in the woods pointed out o fan elder twig. Beethoven could not hear it, and this made him very morose , As the winter approached he realized that his hearing was no better, and that it was likely to get worse, and he might end up totally deaf.
It could be argued that Beethoven’s deafness helped the development of his art: isolated from the world, and unable to perform, he could devote all his time to composing, He was already composing less at the piano, and the first of his bound sketchbooks, in which he made detailed drafts of the works in progress. Date from 1798. In his panic, at the beginning, Beethoven may have believed himself to be deaf. He suffered from tinnitus ( humming and buzzing in the ears), and loud noises caused him pain. In 1804 his friend Stephan von Breuning, with whom he briefly shared lodgings, wrote to Franz Wegler about the terrible effect his gradual loss of hearing was having on Beethoven: it had caused him to distrust his friends, and he was becoming very difficult to be with. But Beethoven did not start using an ear trumpet until 1814.
But above all else, Beethoven was dedicated to his art and the urge to compose remained with him throughout his life. It may be that he shielded away form the commitment of marriage because he knew it would interfere with his art. From a very early age he wanted to compose and, although he needed to earn a living, he wrote ‘I love my art too dearly to be activated solely by self-interest.’
3 NIGHTINGALE
In May 1857 a Commission to study the whole question of the army medical service began to sit. The price was high. Florence Nightingale was doing this grueling work because it was vital, not because she had chosen it. She had changed. Now she was more brilliant in argument than ever, more efficient, more knowledgeable, more persistent and penetrating in her reasoning, scrupulously just, mathematically accurate—but she was pushing herself to the very limits of her capacity at the expense of all joy.
That summer of 1857 was a nightmare for Florence—not only was she working day and night to instruct the politicians sitting on the Commission, she was writing her own confidential report about her experiences. All this while Parthe and Mama lay about on sofas, telling each other not to get exhausted arranging flowers.
It took Florence only six months to complete her own one-thousand-page Confidential Report, Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army. It was an incredibly clear, deeply-considered volume. Every single thing she had learned from t Crimea was there—every statement she made was backed by hard evidence.
Florence Nightingale was basically arguing for prevention rather than cure. It was a new idea then and many politicians and army medical men felt it was revolutionary and positively cranky. They grimly opposed Florence and her allies.
She was forced to prove that the soldiers were dying because of their basic living conditions. She had inspected dozens of hospitals and barracks and now exposed them as damp, filthy and unventilated, with dirty drains and unventilated, with dirty drains and infected water supplies. She showed that the soldiers’ diet was poor. She collected statistics which proved that the death rate for young soldiers in peace time was double that of the normal population.
She showed that, though the army took only the fittest young men, every year 1,500 were killed by neglect, poor food and disease. She declared “Our soldiers enlist to death in the barracks”, and this became the battle cry of her supporters.
The public, too, was on her side. The more the anti-reformers dragged their feet, the greater the reform pressure became.
Florence did not win an outright victory against her opponents, but many changes came through. Soon some barracks were rebuilt and within three years the death rate would halve.
The intense work on the Commission was now over, but Florence was to continue studying, planning and pressing for army medical reform for the next thirty years.
People now began to demand that she apply her knowledge to civilian hospitals, which she found to be “just as bad or worse” than military hospitals. In 1859 she published a book called Notes on Hospitals. It showed the world why people feared to be taken into hospitals and how matters could be remedied.
Florence set forth the then revolutionary theory that simply by improving the construction and physical maintenance, hospital deaths could be greatly reduced. More windows, better ventilation, improved drainage, less cramped conditions, and regular scrubbing of the floors, walls and bed frames were basic measures that every hospital could take.
Florence soon became an expert on the building of hospitals and all over the world hospitals were established according to her specifications. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters from her sofa in London inquiring about sinks and saucepans, locks and laundry rooms. No detail was too small for her considered attention. She worked out ideas for the most efficient way to distribute clean linen, the best method of keeping food hot, the correct number of inches between beds. She intended to change the administration of hospitals from top to toe. Lives depended upon detail.
Florence Nightingale succeeded. All over the world Nightingale-style hospitals would be built. And Florence would continue to advise on hospital plans for over forty years. Today’s hospitals with their flowers and bright, clean and cheerful wards are a direct result of her work.
4 HENRY FORD
Growing up on a remote Michigan farm. Henry Ford knew little of all this — but he soon showed signs that he belonged to a new generation of Americans interested more in the industrial future than in the agricultural past. Like most pioneer farmers, his father, William, hoped that his eldest son would join him on the farm,enable it to expand, and eventually take it over. But Henry proved a disappointment. He hated farm work and did everything he could to avoid it . It was not that he was lazy. Far from it. Give him a mechanical job to do, from mending the hinges of a gate to sharpening tools, and he would set to work eagerly. It was the daily life of the farm, with its repetitive tasks, that frustrated him. “What a waste it is,” he was to write years later, remembering his work in the fields, “for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of houses.
Henry was excited by the possibilities for the future that were being opened up by developments in technology that could free farmers like his father from wasteful and boring toil. But these developments, in Henry’s boyhood, had touched farming hardly at all and farmers went on doing things in the way they had always done. Low profits, the uncertainties of the weather, and farmers’ instinctive resistance to change prevented all but the richest and most far-sighted farmers from taking advantage of the new age of machines.
So Henry turned his attention elsewhere. When he was twelve he became almost obsessively interested in clocks and watches. Like most children before and since, he became fascinated by peering into the workings of a timepiece and watching the movement of ratchets and wheels, springs and pendulums. Soon he was repairing clocks and watches for friends, working at a bench he built in his bedroom.
In 1876, Henry suffered a grievous blow. Mary died in childbirth. There was now no reason for him to stay on the farm, and he resolved to get away as soon as he could. Three years later, he took a job as a mechanic in Detroit. By this time steam engines had joined clocks and watches as objects of Henry’s fascination.
According to an account given by Henry himself, he first saw a steam-driven road locomotive one day in 1877 when he and his father, in their horse-drawn farm wagon, met one on the road. The locomotive driver stopped to let the wagon pass, and Henry jumped down and went to him with a barrage of technical questions about the engine’s performance. From then on, for a while, Henry became infatuated with steam engines. Making and installing them was the business of the Detroit workshop that he joined at the age of sixteen.
A chance meeting with an old co-worker led to a job for Henry as an engineer at the Edison Detroit Electricity Company, the leading force in another new industry. Power stations were being built and cables being laid in all of the United States’ major cities; the age of electricity had dawned. But although Henry quickly learned the ropes of his new job— so quickly that within four years he was chief engineer at the Detroit power plant — his interest in fuel engines had come to dominate his life. At first in the kitchen of his and Clara’s home, and later in a shed at the back of their house, he spent his spare time in the evenings trying to build an engine to his own design.
Meanwhile, Henry’s domestic responsibilities had increased. In November 1893, Clara gave birth to their first and only child, Edsel.
Henry learned the hard way what a slow, painstaking business it was to build an engine by hand from scratch. Every piece of every component had to be fashioned individually, checked and rechecked, and tested. Every problem had to be worried over and solved by the builder. To ease the burden, Henry joined forces with another mechanic, Jim Bishop, Even so, it was two years before they had succeeded in building a working car. It was an ungainly-looking vehicle, mounted on bicycle wheels and driven by a rubber belt that connected the engine to the rear wheels. Henry called it the “Quadricycle”.
5 Michael Jordan
There were already signs that he had a good deal of talent. Harvest Smith, a classmate and close friend who in those days played basketball with him practically every day, thought he was the best player on their ninth-grade team — he was small, but he was every quick. “You’d see him get a shot off, and you’d wonder how he did it, because he wasn’t that bit,” Smith said, “but it was the quickness. The only question was how big he was going to be — and how far up he would take his skill level.”
The summer after ninth grade, Jordan and Smith both went to Pop Herring’s basketball camp. Neither of them had yet come into his body, and almost all of the varsity players, two and sometimes three years older, seemed infinitely stronger at that moment when a year or two in physical development can make all the difference. In Smith’s mind there was no doubt which of the two of them was the better player—it was Michael by far. But on the day the varsity cuts were announced — it was the big day of the year, for they had all known for weeks when the list would be posted — he and Roy Smith had gone to the Laney gym. Smith’s name was on it, Michael’s was not.
It was the worst day of Jordan’s young life. The list was alphabetical, so he focused on where the Js should be, and it wasn’t there, and he kept reading and rereading the list, hoping somehow that he had missed it, or that the alphabetical listing had been done incorrectly. That day he went home by himself and went to his room and cried. Smith understood what was happening — Michael, he knew, never wanted you to see him when he was hurt.
“We knew Michael was good,” Fred Lynch, the Laney assistant coach, said later, “but we wanted him to play more and we thought the jayvee was better for him.” He easily became the best player on the jayvee that year. He simply dominated the play, and he did it not by size but with quickness. There were games in which he would score forty points. He was so good, in fact, that the jayvee games became quite popular. The entire varsity began to come early so they could watch him play in the jayvee games.
Smith noticed that while Jordan had been wildly competitive before he had been cut, after the cut he seemed even more competitive than ever, as if determined that it would never happen again. His coaches noticed it, too. “The first time I ever saw him, I had no idea who Michael Jordan was. I was helping to coach the Laney varsity,” said Ron Coley. “We went over to Goldsboro, which was our big rival, and I entered the gym when the jayvee game was just ending up. There were nine players on the court just coasting, but there was one kid playing his heart out. The way he was playing I thought his team was down one point with two minutes to play. So I looked up at the clock and his team was down twenty points and there was only one minute to play. It was Michael, and I quickly learned he was always like that.”
Between the time he was cut and the start of basketball in his junior year, Jordan grew about four inches. The speed had always been there, and now he was stronger, and he could dunk .His hands had gotten much bigger, Smith noticed. He was as driven as ever, the hardest-working player on the team in practice. If he thought that his teammates were not working hard enough, he would get on them himself, and on occasion he pushed the coaches to get on them. Suddenly Laney High had the beginning of a very good basketball team, and its rising star was Michael Jordan.
6 Winston Churchill
My father, Winston Churchill, began his love affair with painting in his 40s, amid disastrous circumstances. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, he was deeply involved in a campaign in the Dardanelles that could have shortened the course of a bloody world war. But when the mission failed, with great loss of life, Churchill paid the price, both publicly and privately. He was removed from the admiralty and effectively sidelined.
Overwhelmed by the catastrophe — “I thought he would die of grief,” said his wife, Clementine —he retired with his family to Hoe Farm, a country retreat in Surrey. There, as Churchill later recalled, “The muse of painting came to my rescue!”
Wandering in the garden one day, he chanced upon his sister-in-law sketching with watercolors. He watched her for a few minutes, then borrowed her brush and tried his hand. The muse had cast her spell!
Churchill soon decided to experiment with oils. Delighted with this distraction from his dark broodings, Clementine rushed off to buy whatever paints she could find.
For Churchill, however, the next step seemed difficult as he contemplated with unaccustomed nervousness the blameless whiteness of a new canvas. He started with the sky and later described how “very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint on the palette, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean upon the affronted snow-white shield. At that moment the sound of a motor car was heard in the drive. From this chariot stepped the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery .”
“ ‘Painting!’ she declared. ‘But what are you hesitating about? Let me have the brush — the big one.’ Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette, and then several fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas.”
At that time, John Lavery— a Churchill neighbor and celebrated painter— was tutoring Churchill in his art. Later, Lavery said of his unusual pupil: “Had he chosen painting instead of statesmanship, I believe he would have been a great master with the brush.”
In painting, Churchill had discovered a companion with whom he was to walk for the greater part of the years that remained to him. After the war, painting would offer deep solace when, in 1921, the death of the mother was followed two months later by the loss of his and Clementine’s beloved three-year-old daughter, Marigold. Battered by grief, Winston took refuge at the home of friends in Scotland, finding comfort in his painting. He wrote to Clementine: “I went out and painted a beautiful river in the afternoon light with crimson and golden hills in the background. Alas I keep feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly (Marigold’s pet name).”
Historians have called the decade after 1929, when the Conservative government fell and Winston was out of office, his wilderness years. Politically he may have been wandering in barren places, a lonely fighter trying to awaken Britain to the menace of Hitler, but artistically that wilderness bore abundant fruit. During these years he often painted in the South of France. Of the 500-odd canvases extant, roughly 250 date from 1930 to 1939.
Painting remained a joy to Churchill to the end of his life. “Happy are the painters,” he had written in his book Painting as a Pastime, “ for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.” And so it was for my father.
7 George Soros
George Soros wants to be the Bono of the financial world. The speculator whose assault on sterling ejected Britain from the European exchange rate mechanism that September of 10 years ago has a mission--to use his esti-mated £5 bn fortune and his fame to help tackle what he sees as the failures of globalisation. The idea that a man who made billions betting on the financial markets sides with the anti-globalisation movement might strike some as ironic. Soros is clearly genuinely appalled at the damage wrought on vulnerable economies by the vast sums of money which flow across national borders every day.
"The US governs the international system to protect its own economy. It is not in charge of protecting other economies, "he says. "So when America goes into recession, you have anti-recessionary policies. When other countries are in recession, they don't have the ability to engage in anti-recessionary policies because they can't have a permissive monetary policy, because money would flee. "In person, he has the air of a philosophy professor rather than a gimlet-eyed financier. In a soft voice which bears the traces of his native Hungary, he argues that it is time to rewrite the so-called Washington consensus--the cocktail of liberalisation, privatisation and fiscal rectitude which the IMF has been preaching for 15 years. Developing countries no longer have the freedom to run their own economies, he argues, even when they follow perfectly sound policies. He cites Brazil, which although it has a floating currency and manageable public debt was paying ten times over the odds to borrow from capital markets.
Soros, who at one stage after the fall of the Berlin Wall was providing more assistance to Russia than the US government, believes in practising what he preaches.His Open Society Institute has been pivotal in helping eastern European countries develop democratic societies and market economies. Soros has the advantage of an insider's knowledge of the workings of global capitalism, so his criticism is particularly pointed. Last year, the Soros foundation's network spent nearly half a billion dollars on projects in education, public health and promoting democracy, making it one of the world's largest private donors.
Soros credits the anti-globalisation movement for having made companies more sensitive to their wider responsibilities."I think [the protesters] have made an important contribution by making people aware of the flaws of the system, "he says.";People on the street had an impact on public opinion and corporations which sell to the public responded to that."Because the IMF has abandoned billion dollar bailouts for troubled economies, he thinks a repeat of the Asian crisis is unlikely.The fund's new"tough love"policy--for which Argentina is the guinea pig -- has other consequences. The bailouts were a welfare system for Wall Street, with western taxpayers rescuing the banks from the consequences of unwise lending to emerging economies. Now the IMF has drawn a line in the sand, credit to poor countries is drying up."It has created a new problem--the inadequacy of the flow of capital from centre to the periphery, " he says.
The one economy Soros is not losing any sleep about is the US."I am much more positive about the underlying economy than I am about the market, because we are waging war not only terrorism but also on recession, "he says."Although we don't admit it, we are actually applying Keynesian remedies, and I am a confirmed Keynesian. I have not yet seen an economy in recession when you are gearing up for war."He worries that the world's largest economic power is not living up to its responsibilities."I would like the United States to live up to the responsibilities of its hegemonic power because it is not going to give up its hegemonic power, "he says."The only thing that is realistic is for the United States to become aware that it is in its enlightened self-interest to ensure that the rest of the world benefits from their role."
8 Albert Einstein
The scientific touchstones of the modern age——the Bomb, space travel, electronics, Quantum physics——all bear his imprint.
Einstein had conjured the whole business, it seemed. He did not invent the “thought experiment”, but he raised it to high art. Imagine twins , wearing identical watches; one stays home, while the other rides in a spaceship near the speed of light … little wonder that from 1919, Einstein was——and remains today——the world’s most famous scientist.
In his native Germany he became a target for hatred . As a Jew, a liberal, a humanist, an internationalist, he attracted the enmity of rationalist and anti-semites. His was now a powerful voice, widely heard, always attended to , especially after he moved to the U.S. He used it to promote zionism, pacifism, in his secret 1939 letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the construction of a uranium bomb.
Meanwhile, like any demigod, he made bits of legend: that he failed math in school (not true). That he opened a book and found an uncashed $1,500 check he had left as a bookmark (maybe---he was absentminded about everyday affairs).That he was careless about socks, collars, slippers … that he couldn’t even remember his address: 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, where he finally settled.
He died there in 1955 And after the rest of Einstein had been cremated, his brain remained, soaking for decades in a jar of formaldehyde belonging to Dr. Thomas Harvey. No one had bothered to dissect the brain of Freud, Stravinsky or Joyce, but in the 1980s, bits of Einsteinian gray matter were making the rounds of certain neurobiologists, who thus learned … absolutely nothing. It was just a brain——the brain that dreamed a plastic fourth dimension, that banished the ether, that released the pins binding us to absolute space and time, that refused to believe God played dice.
In embracing Einstein, our century took leave of a prior universe and an erstwhile God. The new versions were not so rigid and deterministic as the Newtonian world. Einstein’s. God was no clockmaker, but the embodiment of reason in nature. This God did not control our actions or even sit in judgment on them. (“Einstein, stop telling God what to do,” Niels Bohr Finally retorted.) This God seemed rather kindly and absentminded, as a matter of fact . Physics was free, and we too are free, in the Einstein universe which is where we live.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
Special Relativity
Relativity says that light always moves in a straight line through empty space, and always at the same speed in a vacuum, no matter what your observation point. From these simple claims follow bizarre consequence that challenge common sense and our perception of reality.
* A moving clock runs slower than a stationary one from the perspective of a stationary observer.
* A moving object appears to shrink in the direction of motion, as seen by a stationary observer
General Relativity
In general relativity, time is considered a dimension like height, width and depth, creating a four dimensional universe called space-time. Einstein argued that gravity is really a warping of space-time,with the greatest distortions near the most massive objects. Because light travels in a straight line through the contours of space-time, a light beam will curve where space-time curves, this curving was first measured in 1919
9 Warren Buffett
For someone who is such an extraordinarily successful investor, Warren Buffett comes off as a pretty ordinary guy. Born and bred in Omaha, Nebraska, for more than 40 years Buffett has lived in the same gray stucco house on Farnam Street that he bought for $31,500. He wears rumpled, nondescript suits, drives his own car, drinks Cherry Coke, and is more likely to be found in a Dairy Queen than a four-star restaurant.
But the 68-year-old Omaha native has led an extraordinary life. Looking back on his childhood, one can see the budding of a savvy businessman. Warren Edward Buffett was born on August 30, 1930, the middle child of three. His father, Howard Buffett, came from a family of grocers but himself became a stockbroker and later a U. S. congressman.
Even as a young child, Buffett was pretty serious about making money. He used to go door-to-door and sell soda pop. He and a friend used math to develop a system for picking winners in horseracing and started selling their"Stable-Boy Selections"tip sheets until they were shut down for not having a license. Later, he also worked at his grandfather's grocery store. At the ripe age of 11, Buffett bought his first stock.
When his family moved to Washington, D. C. , Buffett became a paperboy for The Washington Post and its rival the Times-Herald. Buffett ran his five paper routes like an assembly line and even added magazines to round out his product offerings. While still in school, he was making $175 a month, a full-time wage for many young men.
When he was 14, Buffett spent $1,200 on 40 acres of farmland in Nebraska and soon began collecting rent from a tenant farmer. He and a friend also made $50 a week by placing pinball machines in barber shops. They called their venture Wilson Coin Operated Machine Co.
Already a successful albeit small-time businessman, Buffett wasn't keen on going to college but ended up at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania--his father encouraged him to go. After two years at Wharton, Buffett transferred to his parents'alma mater, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, for his final year of college. There Buffett took a job with the Lincoln Journal supervising 50 paper boys in six rural counties.
Buffett applied to Harvard Business School but was turned down in what had to be one of the worst admissions decisions in Harvard history. The outcome ended up profoundly affecting Buffett's life, for he ended up attending Columbia Business School, where he studied under revered mentor Benjamin Graham, the father of securities analysis who provided the foundation for Buffett's investment strategy.
From the beginning, Buffett made his fortune from investing. He started with all the money he had made from selling pop, delivering papers, and operating pinball machines. Between 1950 and 1956, he grew his $9,800 kitty to $14,000. From there, he organized investment partnerships with his family and friends, and then gradually drew in other investors through word of mouth and very attractive terms.
Buffett's goal was to top the Dow Jones Industrial Average by an average of 10% a year. Over the length of the Buffett partnership between 1957 and 1969, Buffett's investments grew at a compound annual rate of 29.5%, crushing the Dow's return of 7.4% over the same period.
Buffett's investment strategy mirrors his lifestyle and overall philosophy. He doesn't collect houses or cars or works of art, and he disdains companies that waste money on such extravagances as limousines, private dining rooms, and high-priced real estate. He is a creature of habit--same house, same office, same city, same soda--and dislikes change. In his investments, that means holding on to "core holdings"such as American Express, Coca-Cola, and The Washington Post Co. "forever. "
Buffett's view of inherited money also departs from the norm. Critical of the self-indulgence of the super-rich, Buffett thinks of inheritances as"privately funded food stamps"that keep children of the rich from leading normal, independent lives. With his own three kids, he gave them each $10,000 a year--the tax-deductible limit--at Christmas. When he gave them a loan, they had to sign a written agreement. When his daughter, also named Susie like her mother, needed $20 to park at the airport, he made her write him a check for it.
As for charity, Buffett's strict standards have made it difficult for him to give much away. He evaluates charities the same way he looks for stocks:value for money, return on invested capital. He has established the Buffett Foundation, designed to accumulate money and give it away after his and his wife's deaths--though the foundation has given millions to organizations involved with population control, family planning, abortion, and birth control. The argument goes that Buffett can actually give away a greater sum in the end by growing his money while he's still alive.
One thing's for sure about Buffett:He 's happy doing what he's doing. "I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year, "he says. "I get to do it with people I like, and I don't have to associate with anybody who causes my stomach to churn. I tap dance to work, and when I get there I think I'm supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling. It's tremendous fun." It's fun to watch the master at work, too.
10 Jim Carrey
Jim Carrey has become one of the most recognized faces in the world —and it is precisely because of his face that he has achieved such fame. His rubbery look, and penchant for wild and extreme behavior has given him a notoriety he delights in.
Born in New Market, Ontario, Canada on January 17th, 1962 to a working class family, growing up poor was tough for young Jim Carrey, While in his teens, he had to take a job as a janitor when his father lost his job and he had to juggle both School and work. School eventually lost out and he dropped out. He describes himself as being very angry at this time in his life, yet one good thing came out of it. He developed a tremendous sense of humour to help him cope and to shield his anger from the world.
He was a loner who claims he didn’t have any friends because he didn’t want any. Between school and work there just wasn’t much time for a childhood. At 15 though, he had enough time to start performing at Yuk Yuks, a famous Toronto comedy club where he began to perfect his shtick. He moved to LA and did the club circuit there. He soon came to the attention of Rodney and was put on his tour.
Jim Carrey got his big break in 1990, when he landed a role on the hip new sketch comedy show In Living Color which boasted a cast of African-Americans and Carrey, the sole white guy. While there, Carrey perfected many characters, most notoriously “Fire Marshal Bill” who always went up in a blaze. The sketch was yanked when critics claimed that it encouraged kids to play with fire. The controversy put Carrey’s name in the headlines for the first time.
He broke into feature films, and into the collective unconscious of the world, in one single successful year, 1994. It was the Year of the Funny Face. First there was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a surprise hit that show Carrey’s now signature wacky style. Next came The Mask, a role that seemed tailor-made for him and was a hit with audiences. As if he hadn’t made an impression yet, there was still Dumb and Dumber which was released during the holiday season and ended up on top of the box office. Jim Carrey was in the limelight now and he hasn’t looked back since.
Since that famous year Carrey has, dare we say it••••, slowed down a bit. His films have come out less often but have continued to make waves if not quite of the caliber as previously seen. There was Batman Forever, in which he inherited the role of The Riddler. Then there was a sequel to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls which didn’t quite recapture the sparkle of the original. Next came Liar, Liar. The film was a tremendous success with crowds everywhere and put him back on top. It also brought his salary back up 20 million. Then came The Truman Show, a film which proved to the world that Jim Carrey was more than just a funny face.
In fact, Jim was awarded a Golden Globe for his dramatic portrayal. When he was snubbed by the Oscars, there was a collective gasp heard around the world. Clearly the fans at least think Jim Carrey is golden.
The future looks good for Jim Carrey, he has developed a legion of devoted fans who love his wild style of physical comedy. He has proven his ability to weather a storm and come out on top, important for any celebrity.
Carrey has come a long way from his unhappy childhood and in fact seems to be living a second childhood now. Canada has been producing fine comedic talents for years, and Jim Carrey is definitely the best of the new breed.
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