9-5 job is boring!!!
How many of you have exclaimed it? And how many times?
Not just boring, it is annoying, it is devastating. It’s even suicidal for a few.
That’s why there are a few free-minded souls who would take the risk and start their little something. We often call these people “Entrepreneurs”. In this article, I am listing down the most influential top 10 entrepreneurs of all time. This post is in no way a diss to the ones doing 9-5 jobs. I do that too, I got to run my bread and butter just like you all. But like many others, I am inspired by the entrepreneurs who didn’t just challenge the norm but also broke it. Before diving in, let’s take a look at some basics and stats.
Disclaimer: This post is about the greatest, not the richest.
Who is an Entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs by definition are people who start their ventures by taking risks in hope of a profit.
Most people call “Entrepreneurs” crazy. But many times, these crazy people blew others’ minds with their success and fame. They proved others wrong and proved their worth. These entrepreneurs are the reason behind the popularity of “Entrepreneurship” today.
Some Entrepreneurship Stats
Today,
- This world has around 582M entrepreneurs and this number is growing every day.
- Approximately 90% of new billionaires in the US are entrepreneurs.
- As per data, around 25M Americans were either starting launching or running their ventures in 2016.
- The most common age of small business entrepreneurs is between 41-56 which means most think of starting their own business when they are tired of their 9-5 job (also they have seen their bosses mistakes and know what to and what not to do).
- Around 20% of the entrepreneurs fail. (it’s not all gold, take your risks wisely)
Let’s begin with the count down…
Top 10 Greatest Entrepreneurs of the World
J.K. Rowling
The number 1 on our list of self-made people is J.K. Rowling. Today, she is known to everybody and people from all over the world admire her. She has become a household name because of the very famous Harry Potter book series. Her current net worth is USD 1 billion today. She has millions of fans across the world of all age groups.
However, it wasn’t always like that. She wasn’t always magical. J.K. Rowling was living off on welfare and trying to make ends meet as a single mother when her best-selling novel enchanted readers.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is another one on the list. She is world-famous for her hosting skills. As you may already know, Oprah Winfrey is the wealthiest African American of the current century. She is arguably the most powerful woman on the planet as well.
Given her difficult childhood, her tremendous accomplishment is all the more remarkable. She was raised in dire distress as the child of an unmarried single mother who worked as a domestic servant. Her family was so underprivileged that she was bullied at school as a kid for wearing clothes out of potato sacks. She had also been the victim of sexual harassment by her family members. Yet she grew to become such a powerful and badass lady because of her to-do attitude and boss lady personality.
Walt Disney
Walt Disney is a hero to many. He began his career as a farm boy with the talent of drawing cartoons. He applied as a newspaper cartoonist but didn’t find success there. So, he settled for working in an art studio where he’d create ads for newspapers and magazines. His luck got in and he started working on commercials. It is then his interest sparked in animation. Oswald was his first original character creation which had the copyrights of Universal Pictures. When he quit Universal Pictures, he started his little venture and introduced Mickey Mouse to the world.
His animation studio was a huge hit, but Disney wasn’t content. He was dead set on creating the world’s largest and most spectacular theme park and that’s how Disney World came into creation. Disney is unquestionably one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time who had a vision, a goal, and he worked hard towards realizing it.
Charles Merrill
He was a pioneer in bringing high finance to the masses. The general people had thrown off equities and everything more substantial than a savings account following the 1929 catastrophe. Merrill reversed that by taking a supermarket-style and foregoing hefty commissions to serve more customers, recouping his losses through increased volume. Merrill fought tooth and nail to simplify the system, educate his customers through free lectures, disclosing his company’s code of behavior, and always putting his consumers’ needs first.
Charles Schwab
Charles Schwab, or “Chuck,” carried Merrill’s fondness of the underdog and trust in volume above price into the internet era. When May Day allowed for negotiated costs, Chuck was the one to provide a bargain brokerage for individual investors. To accomplish this, he reduced the size of the research team, analysts, as well as advisors, and encouraged investors to take control of their orders. He subsequently added services that important to his consumers, such as 24-hour support and far more branches, to a bare-bones foundation. Small investors were reintroduced to the market by Merrill, but Chuck made it affordable for them.
Madam CJ Walker
Sarah Breedlove, well-known as Madam CJ Walker was a truly remarkable woman. She is considered the first black woman to become a self-made millionaire in the United States. Her family was living the life of slaves on a Louisiana plantation. Hers was the first generation of her kin to be raised in a free country. She launched her brand of beauty and hair products targeted exclusively towards black ladies. She identified a gap in the market and devised a solution to an issue that no one else appeared interested in tackling. This helped her in growing gigantically. This proved how smart she was for her time and why today, she is on this list of the top 10 greatest entrepreneurs.
Sam Walton
Sam Walton identified a market that no one desired and implemented a retail distribution method that no one else had explored before. He was able to save money on shipping by constructing warehouses amongst several of his Wal-Mart locations. This allowed him to get products to popular stores much quicker. With the use of a cutting-edge inventory management system, Walton was able to keep his cost margins substantially below those of his rival companies. Instead of reinvesting all of the profits, He distributed them to the customer. He brought increasingly business to the location where he decided to start a shop by continually giving inexpensive prices. He finally took Wal-Mart to the major metropolis to compete on margins with the big names and that’s how he succeeded and carved his way to this list
Thomas Edison
He was undoubtedly intelligent, but it was his economic acumen, not his ingenuity as an engineer, that demonstrated his brilliance. Edison transformed invention into the research and development process that we currently know. He offered his expertise to several other corporations before going out on his own and building the majority of the US’ electrical power infrastructure. Although Edison was a founder of General Electric, he was also the creator of several other firms, including Con Edison, Edison Electric, and others. Even though he had many more patents than business affiliations, it is the firms that will continue on his name.
Henry Ford
He was one of the mechanics that worked on automobiles, and he wasn’t even the greatest of them. These counterparts, on the other hand, were marketing their automobiles at a cost that made them a luxury item for the wealthy. Ford placed all of America on vehicles, not only the wealthy, and unlocked the potential of large-scale production. His Ford Model T was the very first automobile to appeal to the majority of Americans. His progressive labor practices and continual push to make each automobile better, speedier, and cost-effective ensured that his employees and ordinary Americans will think of Ford when they went car shopping.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the last one on our list of the top 10 greatest entrepreneurs this world has produced. And I must say we are quite lucky to share the space with this intelligent human being. He started programming at the age of 10 only and created his first game at the age of 12. He dropped out of college on the second day and started his venture “Zip2”. Zip2 helped in providing and licensing the city guide software to news companies. Zip2 was later acquired by Compaq that led Musk to found PayPal, an online money transfer system, that is used worldwide today. PayPal was later bought by eBay. After PayPal, he worked on creating economical rockets through Space X and then joined Tesla Motors in the capacity of CEO and Product architect. Tesla’s Model 3 which was launched under his supervision made Tesla more cost-friendly and effective and entered Tesla to the mass market.
I will conclude my list here. If you (much like me) are on the verge of a breakdown because of your job and have a good idea, to begin with. It’s time to launch it and wear the “Entrepreneur’s hat”.
