Three stories about the struggle of successful people

The road of life will not be smooth sailing, and the career journey is full of bumps. Only struggle, only struggle, can we reach the other side of success. The following is the story I compiled for you about the struggle of successful people. I hope you like it!

The Struggle Story of Successful People 1: Peter Thiel

He is a mathematical genius and a chess master, and likes the works of Solzhenitsyn and Rand. In the global internet community, venture capitalist Peter? Thiel is a name that cannot be bypassed. Because people in the industry are always looking forward to hearing what new projects this "prophet" figure is interested in, and also because of his successful entrepreneurial and investment experience and his ability to turn stone into gold.

PayPal listed, the first bucket of gold in life.

University Avenue, located in the most prosperous area of Palo Alto, is the outpost for the release of scientific and technological products in Silicon Valley. There is a room called cafe in this street. Cafe in Venice. Peter. Most of Thiel's industries are built in Caf? Looking around Venice, the guests in this cafe are all people who use Apple devices and are not very well dressed but full of energy. Their discussion topics are inseparable from their own creativity and venture capital. 1In the summer of 998, Max, a 23-year-old Ukrainian programmer who just came to San Francisco? Max Levchin listened to Thiel's lecture on currency trading at Stanford University. The next day, they met in Palo Alto, hoping to establish an electronic payment system to make e-commerce transactions simple, unified and secure, which is the prototype of PayPal in the future. In 2002, Thiel and his friend Allen were in this cafe? Elon Musk met to discuss whether to list PayPal and reached an agreement. Finally, this electronic payment company, founded in 1998, went public successfully, with a market value of about1200 million US dollars, becoming the first large-scale IPO after the "9 1 1" incident. Subsequently, PayPal was acquired by Yi Bei for $654.38+05 billion, and Thiel got the first bucket of gold of $55 million.

Venture capital, turning stone into gold

Thiel, who was financially free, then devoted himself to venture capital. He renamed Thiel Capital Management, which was founded in 1996, Clarium Capital Management, and injected 1000000 USD into it. Since then, Thiel has been patiently looking for promising startups. At that time, social networking, an area that few people liked, was considered as the next dangerous Internet bubble, but Thiel was still full of confidence. In the summer of 2004, Hoffman and Silicon Valley urchin Sean? Sean parker introduced Thiel to Zuckerberg, who was looking for major investors for Facebook. Thiel provided $500,000 in start-up capital for Facebook, when the company was valued at less than $5 million. This is Facebook's first foreign investment. This investment won him a 7% stake in Facebook and became a member of the company's board of directors. Although Thiel sold nearly half of the shares in the following years and the remaining shares were further diluted by Facebook's multiple rounds of financing, Thiel still holds about 3% of the shares. If calculated by the market value of $654.38+000 billion after Facebook's listing, the value of Thiel's shares is expected to reach $3 billion, and the return on investment will exceed 6,000 times. What about Mark? Zuckerberg created Facebook, a miracle that changed human life style, so Peter? Peter thiel, born in 1964, is the driving force behind this miracle. The American internet community once again remembered Thiel's name.

A year later, he set up the Founders Fund with US$ 50 million. After setting up the Foundation, he invested in a series of highly innovative start-up companies, including YouTube, photo sharing software companies Slide and Yelp, Palantir Technologie, which develops software for searching for terrorists and financial fraud, electric car company Chris and micro-credit company Kiva. These companies turned out to be very successful It can be said that Thiel is the most successful technology venture capitalist in the world.

How to choose promising entrepreneurs? Thiel said that he would ask every entrepreneur seeking investment the most important question, that is, "Why did the 20th employee join your company?" Thiel thinks: "It's easy to explain why some people want to be CEOs or join startups as early employees, because they want to run a company or get rich by joining early startups. It is also easy to know why the1000th employee is willing to join, because it is obvious that the company is on the road of growth, and joining can earn a stable income. But the 20th employee will have many different meanings. Because most of your company's equity has been allocated when the company 19 employees joined, but the company has not succeeded, so in order to stabilize income, your company is not a place worth joining. " "I will only vote for the company that answers this question, that is, the 20th employee will join in, because the company is doing something brand-new and different."

Contradictory complex, "born to win"

Thiel 1967 was born in Frankfurt, Germany. His father is a chemical engineer. His father Klaus has repeatedly jumped ship in several large engineering enterprises. He always took his family everywhere and finally settled in Foster, 20 miles south of San Francisco. Thiel goes to primary school in seven different places. Finally, in the fifth grade, he settled in Foster in San Francisco Bay. Gentel's early growth environment was full of self-confidence, intelligence and loneliness. He is a genius in mathematics and a chess master. His chess board is pasted with the motto of life "Born to win". When he was a teenager, his favorite reading was The Lord of the Rings, and he always read it again and again. At the same time, he also likes the works of Solzhenitsyn and Rand. Thiel grew up in a _ _ _ _ family and became a Christian in high school. He began to believe in libertarianism and even became an extreme believer of libertarianism. He described his faith as "a little heretical" and said, "I believe in Christ. But I don't try to convince others to keep the same faith as me. " At the same time, as a Christian, Thiel is also an out-and-out homosexual, which is one of the concrete manifestations of Thiel's being called ambivalent complex by the outside world. In this regard, he said, "In my mind, identity exists in various subtle forms. I think gays, blacks and women all have profound and different experiences. I also believe that everyone has an exaggerated trend and has raised it to the ideological field. " Obviously, Thiel is a typical contradiction complex. He lives or does business in his utopia and enjoys it.

The information age has brought Thiel great wealth, but he is still disappointed. He believes that the internet technology revolution has not created enough jobs, nor has it improved the manufacturing level and social productivity. Innovation in the virtual world cannot replace technological progress in the real world. Thiel rarely updates his Facebook page. He is also "not used to using things like BlackBerry, iPhone or email." It was not until a year ago that he started texting.

Firmly believe that innovation saves the world.

Now, Thiel, who has made a lot of money in the field of social media, has a new goal to fund those "ideas that can save the world", in his words, at least "to raise our civilization to a new level". Thiel believes that almost all the problems in the world, such as the defects of government institutions and education systems, lingering financial turmoil, market bubbles, energy crises and resource wars, all stem from the stagnation of scientific and technological innovation, and the only way to save them can only be a drastic scientific breakthrough. At present, Thiel has invested a lot of money in companies that focus on crazy ideas such as extending life, moving to offshore platforms, commercialization of space, friendly artificial intelligence, and modifying DNA sequences to accelerate evolution. Recently, his Thiel Foundation invested in another remarkable project, the fresh meat 3D printing technology startup.

Modern Meadow, a company engaged in the research of 3D printing technology for fresh meat, is located in Missouri, USA. It is said that it has received a six-figure investment from the Thiel Foundation. According to the company, through special treatment and cultivation of different types of special structural layers, test-tube meat can become edible, and it can also provide the human body with the required protein. The company said that it was engaged in this research to reduce the environmental impact of large-scale farming. At present, the meat produced is 2 cm long, 1 cm wide and half a millimeter thick. "We look forward to attracting a group of early consumers who like cooking and vegetarianism for moral reasons. Then with the gradual reduction of prices, more religious vegetarians (such as Hindus, Jews and Muslims) are recognized, and finally hope to provide safe and secure pork products for the general public. "

At present, Thiel ranks 365th on the Forbes list with a net asset of $6,543.8+$50 million. Thiel's contribution to the Internet world is not only as a venture capitalist, but also his unique thinking ability. In any case, Thiel's dream is to change the world.

The Struggle Story of Successful People 2: Christopher? Li Wei

In those days, Christopher? Because of his successful performance in the blockbuster Superman, Li Wei became famous in the international film industry. However, while he was in Hollywood, his acting career came to an abrupt end because of an accident. 1May, 995, in a fierce equestrian competition, he accidentally fell headlong and became a paraplegic, who could only sit in a wheelchair forever. When he woke up from a coma, the first thing he said to his family was: "Let me get rid of it as soon as possible!" "

After leaving the hospital, his family pushed him to travel in a wheelchair in order to distract him.

Once, the car passed the winding Panshan Highway in the Rocky Mountains. He looked out of the window quietly and found the mountain road winding. The words "turn ahead" hit his eyes again and again and gradually awakened his heart: it turned out that this was not the end of the road, but a turn. He suddenly realized and shouted at his wife, "I want to go back, I still have a way to go!" " "

From then on, he became a director in a wheelchair.

His first film won the Golden Globe Award. He also began to write hard with his teeth biting his pen. As soon as his first book, Still Me, came out, it entered the bestseller list and won the literary prize. At the same time, he founded an educational resource center for paralyzed patients and was elected as the chairman of the General Paralysis Association. He also ran around, held lectures, raised money for the welfare of the disabled and became a famous social activist.

Recently, Time magazine in the United States reported his deeds with the title "Ten years later, he is still Superman". In this article, he reviewed his mental journey and said, "When misfortune comes, it is not that the road has come to an end, but that you should turn."

The Struggle Story of Successful People 3: Chen Guangbiao

The poor boy started his own business from scratch.

Chen cursor, 45, was born in the rural area of Tianganghu Township, Sihong County, Jiangsu Province. The parents who live by farming gave birth to five children. When Chen cursor was 2 years old, a brother and a sister starved to death because of extreme poverty.

When Chen cursor 13 years old, he rode his bike for more than ten miles every day to sell popsicles. Later, Chen cursor began to sell grain again. At first, it was five or six yuan a day, and later it was more than 300 yuan a day. /kloc-at the end of the summer vacation at the age of 0/7, Chen cursor earned 20,000 yuan, becoming the first "juvenile ten thousand yuan household" in the township.

Chen cursor did not neglect his studies. He does business in his spare time or holidays. 1985, Chen cursor was admitted to Nanjing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. After graduation, he chose to continue his business.

He thinks that the ear acupoint disease detector has a short market time and a good market prospect, but it is not intuitive. Patients can't see the test results intuitively, so they pay experts to provide guidance, simply improve the ear acupoint disease detector, install a display shell, and input physiological images. As long as patients hold the two electrodes of the instrument, they can intuitively see which part of their body has diseases on the display. This new instrument, named "Cross-century Home CT" by Chen cursor, won a national patent and was widely praised as soon as it went on the market. The wholesale price of such an instrument, which costs less than 5000 yuan, is around 5000 yuan. Chen cursor has opened Jiangsu and Anhui markets successively, and sold more than 5,000 products in half a year.

1996, 28-year-old Chen cursor founded Nanjing Li Jinwei Electronic Medical Equipment Co., Ltd. and sold electronic disease detectors to more than 20 provinces, cities and regions in China. By 2000, he had earned tens of millions of yuan.

This year, Chen cursor went to Taian, Shandong. At that time, Taian was rich in Ganoderma lucidum, and the price was lower, one kilogram in 200 yuan. Chen cursor found that there were great business opportunities. "Ganoderma lucidum is good, but it is not convenient to eat. If it can be ground into powder, it is much more convenient to make capsules. " With this exciting idea, he knocked on the door of experts from Nanjing University and major hospitals in the province, invited experts from Nanjing University to do advertising planning, and then invited hospitals to make clinical reports. After obtaining the production license, he raised money to order a production line in Shanghai, then went to Tai 'an, Shandong Province to buy a large amount of Ganoderma lucidum powder, and then came back for deep processing and technical treatment to make Ganoderma lucidum capsules. In this way, one kilogram of Ganoderma lucidum purchased by 200 yuan was made into capsules, and the price reached 2,000 yuan per kilogram, which made Chen cursor gain a lot.

By 2000 1 year, Chen cursor will make a net profit of1by selling ear point disease detection and treatment instruments and ganoderma lucidum capsules. 200 million yuan. "I started my business from scratch at the age of 32 and became a billionaire. It can be regarded as an example for young people to start a business." Chen cursor said.

What makes Chen cursor happy is that the "Ganoderma Capsule" project has promoted the "Ganoderma lucidum economy" in Tai 'an, Shandong Province and brought wealth to the people.

Digging "Treasure" from Construction Waste

At the beginning of 2002, Chen cursor became interested in the field of circular economy through the introduction of friends.

"According to the regulations of the relevant departments, in the transformation of the old city, the developer will subsidize the demolition company for dozens of yuan for each old house with a construction area of 1 square meter. But in fact, most demolition companies are willing to work for nothing as long as they can find jobs, even if the developers don't give money. Don't think that these companies are doing seemingly embarrassing demolition business like Lei Feng, but they are actually profitable. Every time a building with a building area of 1 square meter is demolished, you can earn about 30 yuan on average, and the high one can earn 60 yuan. " Originally steel, wood, plastic, etc. Things removed from old buildings can fetch a good price because they can be recycled. After listening to a friend's introduction, Chen cursor, who is looking for projects everywhere, brightened up and decided to set foot in the building demolition industry.

In the spring of this year, he convened the people to set up Huangpu Demolition Company. Although Chen cursor didn't make much money in the first year of his trip, he accumulated valuable industry experience. The following year, his company won a big project by bidding to demolish an old exhibition hall that looked shabby in Nanjing. This is simply an "invisible gold mine". Scrap steel, wood, wires and plastics removed alone are worth more than 4 million yuan, not including workers' wages and other costs. This single business made Chen cursor earn a net profit of 2.85 million yuan.

Steel taken from the ruins of buildings is the most popular. At the beginning of a project, steel recycling companies will send cars and people to "wait" Because it has a recycling rate of 100%, it can be completely transformed in the workshop of iron and steel enterprises and become a brand-new and tight commodity; Wood removed from buildings can be recycled by manufacturers to make floors and furniture. Even small pieces of wood are not cheap enough to be used as firewood, but made into machine-made boards, splints, tongue-and-groove boards and so on. Wujiang, Jiangsu Province is the loading and unloading place for this kind of small wood. The local timber factory has a device to "eat" the discarded small timber and "spit out" the neat machine-made board. All the wood that Chen cursor removed from the ruins of the building is sold there.

Everything that can be recycled has been recycled, leaving only real construction waste on the construction site. How to deal with these huge wastes is the biggest headache for demolition companies and even government departments. They are mainly composed of concrete fragments, masonry, muck, mortar, decoration garbage and so on. In the eyes of the demolition company, these are useless "goods at a loss", because each ton of garbage needs to pay the freight in 20 yuan. A 6,543,800-square-meter demolition project will generate 80,000 tons of construction waste, and the freight alone will cost 6,543,800 yuan.

Chen cursor has a bold idea: if I can turn construction waste into ecological building materials, it will not only solve the problem of "garbage besieged city", but also turn waste into treasure, wouldn't it kill two birds with one stone! He made many attempts, but all ended in failure.

When he visited Germany in 2004, Chen cursor discovered a "magic weapon" that he had never seen for a long time. That is a "behemoth" construction waste treatment equipment parked at the demolition site. Blink of an eye, a mountain of bricks, concrete blocks and other construction waste was "chewed" into fine particles by it. The technician said that this particle can be used to pave the road. Chen cursor immediately introduced 10 pieces of construction waste crushing equipment from Berlin at a high price of 3 million each.

Chen cursor calls this kind of assembly line equipment "deformed gold steel", because no matter it is broken square bricks, round stones or unformed concrete slag, this guy can become small particles when he is in front of everyone, as long as he puts it in his big mouth.

Next, Chen cursor began to sell the construction waste particles in his hand to the road repair unit. At first, people were dubious and asked him to put some goods first. After understanding the beauty of this environmentally friendly building material, the customer not only paid off the payment on the spot, but also eagerly placed a large order with him. It turns out that they used to use crushed stones for paving foundation, and the price per ton was 130 140 yuan, while the new materials provided by Chen cursor only needed 30 yuan per ton. In addition, gravel is produced by blasting rocks, which also destroys the ecological environment. Using Chen cursor's products as subgrade is not only excellent in quality, but also very environmentally friendly.

The ruins turned into gold mines. Worth tens of billions.

On July 1 day, 2004, in order to protect land resources, the state issued a ban on the use of solid clay bricks. This makes many brick factories fall into a dilemma: either close down or use stone powder, sand, lime, fly ash and other alternative raw materials to make bricks, but these raw materials are hard to find and the cost is too high. At this time, Chen cursor released a good news: construction waste can also produce durable bricks, and it is environmentally friendly.

It turned out that as soon as the regulations prohibiting digging and burning bricks came out, Chen cursor began to use his brains to improve his mechanical equipment. After some efforts, he got his wish, so that "deformed gold steel" can not only produce small particles, but also spit out fine powder. He sold these deep-processed powdery construction wastes to brick-making enterprises at a high price.

The price of construction waste powder provided by Chen cursor is much lower than that of concrete and lime. , soon replaced other brick-making raw materials and became the new favorite of brick-making enterprises. Since then, the car powder sold by Chen cursor has become a car full of green bricks, hollow bricks, pavement bricks, sidewalk bricks and green belt bricks. Tested by relevant departments, these new environmental protection bricks not only meet the quality standards, but also have a longer service life than traditional red bricks, but their weight is 20% lighter than the former.

Since then, many environmental brick factories have been chasing Chen cursor to produce raw materials, and the phone calls from highway construction units have also overwhelmed him.

In February 2005, Chen cursor founded Jiangsu Huangpu Renewable Resources Utilization Co., Ltd. to develop circular economy and green economy. Later, he transplanted the circular economy model of house demolition to used cars, household appliances, production equipment and so on. For example, waste tires can be made into agricultural tires or plastic runways after cleaning, cutting and crushing. Since then, there is no real garbage in Chen cursor's eyes, only the treasure misplaced.

Because "Huangpu" is the first high-tech environmental protection demolition company in China, the demolition project is getting bigger and bigger: the demolition project in the widening project of Chang' an Avenue in Beijing and the demolition project of CCTV building in fire are all done by Chen cursor's company; The rubber track of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was also made of "waste".

The expanding market has brought huge benefits to Chen cursor, and his personal wealth snowballed. After becoming a rich class, Chen cursor did not forget to repay the society and repeatedly made "big money" in donating money for disaster relief. Wenchuan earthquake, he took 1. The donation of 8 1 100 million yuan included the title of "the first good in China". On September 5th, 20 10, Chen cursor hung up in his company official website and sent a letter to Bill? A letter from Gates and Buffett announced that they would donate all their property to charity after their death. It is estimated that at that time, there were more than 600 large-scale equipment in many cities in China 10, and office buildings were purchased in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nanjing and other places. Together with other fixed assets and cash, it is about 5 billion yuan.

Chen cursor's kindness also brought him unexpected gains. Because "Huangpu" is famous, and Chen cursor's kind character has won the respect of countless people, especially since 20 12, he has taken on more and more demolition projects.

In 20 14, he was working on demolition projects including Shanghai Baosteel and Nanjing Iron and Steel Works, as well as cement plants in Henan, chemical plants in Tianjin and hydropower stations in Chongqing.

Experts predict that in the next 30 years, there will be "ten emerging technologies", among which "garbage disposal" ranks second. Now, although Chen cursor's company has become a large enterprise with more than 4,000 employees and businesses all over the country, with personal assets exceeding 9 billion yuan, he is still not satisfied. Recently, he hired a group of experts from abroad to settle in Huangpu, trying to improve the recycling rate of construction waste to 100% through technical research, extract more "gold" from the ruins, and make the city better!

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