What makes certain people seemingly fated to be famous? Is it their wealth, charisma, stamina … or ruthlessness? Could it perhaps be something in their childhood or up-bringing? It is some secret that others can replicate? Below are six famous people from recent history, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Golda Mier, Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler. Read through some brief descriptions of their early lives. See if you can detect any secret pattern, before they were famous.
1. Inventor Thomas Edison
The famous American inventor, Thomas Edison, was born in 1847, in Milan, Ohio, the youngest of seven children. His father was an exiled Canadian political activist and his mother a school teacher. An early case of severe scarlet fever as a child left young Tom with profound hearing deficiencies in both his ears. It was a burden he would carry for the rest of his life.
In 1854, Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. There, he attended public school … but only for about 12 weeks. He was a hyperactive child, easily prone to distraction (what today we would label Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD). His teacher deemed him “difficult” and “unteachable.”
His angry mother pulled him from the school and decided to home school him herself. By 11, young Thomas had developed an insatiable hunger for knowledge of all kinds, reading dozens and dozens of books on a wide range of subjects. In this way, Edison essentially self-educated himself on topics that keenly interested him by learning independently. It was a pattern he would follow throughout his life.
At age 12, Thomas convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers at the Grand Trunk Railroad. He took advantage of access to the news bulletins that were teletyped to the station each day. Edison began publishing his own small newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald. His “breaking news” was widely popular with rail passengers. It was the first of many entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and seized on the opportunity.
A teenage Edison once saved a three-year-old boy from being run over by a train at his station. The child’s grateful father, a telegrapher, rewarded him with Edison’s own request – teaching him to operate a telegraph. By 15, Thomas had learned enough to work as a telegraph operator. For 5 years, young Edison traveled the Midwest as an travelling telegrapher, subbing for those men who joined the Union Army and left for the U.S. Civil War.
In his spare time, he experimented with technology, and became familiar with electronics. The night shift allowed him to spend his time reading and experimenting. But his hearing disability left Edison disadvantaged. In 1866 at 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, working for The Associated Press. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for tallying votes. It would be the first of many such inventions to come.
2. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, in Manhattan, New York City. He was the second of 4 children born to businessman and socialite parents. Roosevelt’s youth was burdened by his poor health and often debilitating asthma. Doctors of the time sadly had no cure to offer his parents. Nevertheless, Teddy was a mischievously inquisitive kid. His interest in animals of all kind began at age 7 when Roosevelt and two cousins opened what they called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History“. He learned the basics of taxidermy from a shopkeeper and filled it with animals he’d caught himself.
Roosevelt’s father greatly influenced him. Theodore Sr. was a New York leader who helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and mobilize Union Army support during the American Civil War. Roosevelt later said, “My father was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness and unselfishness. He would not tolerate selfishness or cruelty, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”
Young Theodore was homeschooled by hired tutors. He was strong in history, biology, and languages; though he struggled in mathematics and Latin. He and his father discovered the benefits of physical exertion in minimizing his asthma symptoms. So as a teenager, Roosevelt began a heavy regime of exercise. After being ruffed up by two older boys, he found a boxing coach to teach him to fight and defend himself.
He entered Harvard College in 1876 and moved to Boston. His beloved father’s sudden death two years later devastated the young Roosevelt. Nevertheless, he continued to study biology intently and became an accomplished naturalist. He read for hours daily with an almost photographic memory. He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and an editor of The Harvard Advocate. In 1880, the intelligent Roosevelt graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.
After his father’s death, Roosevelt had inherited enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life. Instead, he gave up his first plan of studying natural sciences and decided to attend Columbia Law School in New York. After graduating, frustrated by the ineptitude of government, he became determined to enter politics. Roosevelt began attending meetings of New York’s Republican Association. It was the first step of a meteoric rise in politics.
3. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Mier
The first and only female Prime Minister of Israel, was born Golda Mabovitch in 1898 in Kiev, Ukraine. It was then a part of the Russian Empire ruled by the Tzar. She was one of eight children born to a carpenter father and his wife. As a young child, she witnessed first hand the violent anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. Pogrom was a widespread anti-Semitism that resulted in Jews becoming the scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the Russian people.
In 1905, Golda’s father had enough and emigrated the entire family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in America. She was angry however, over her father’s inability to protect their family in Russia. This developed into a lifelong instinct – if you wanted to survive in the world, you had to take action yourself.
By her teens, she was an devoted Zionist, believing in reestablishing a Jewish state in their historical homeland of Palestine. When her rabbi denied her permission to talk at a Zionist forum, she instead stood on bench outside the door and shouted her message to the congregation as they entered and exited the synagogue.
When her parents pressured her to skip high school and marry a much older man, she refused and left home. While living in Denver with her older sister, she met and fell in love with her future husband, Morris Myerson. They would marry and then join other Zionists emigrating to then Ottoman-controlled Palestine in the Middle East.
She firmly believed, that as a Jew, she personally belonged in Palestine. At the time, Palestine was occupied mostly by Arabs. But around the time of World War I, European Jews fleeing persecution in their home countries had immigrated there also in hopes of establishing a Jewish state.
In 1921, Golda and Morris joined a kibbutz commune. She eventually won the other member’s respect and admiration for her hard work. She felt unfulfilled, however, as a traditional wife and mother. Ultimately, the kibbutz chose her to represent them in a labor organization in Tel Aviv, attempting to form a new Israeli state. Her new job propelled her up the political ladder in the future Knesset.
4. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was born at the family’s estate near Oxford in 1874. He came from a long line of aristocrat-politicians. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was descended from the First Duke of Marlborough and a well-known Member of Parliament (MP). His mother was an American heiress whose father was part-owner of The New York Times.
Throughout much of his childhood, his parents were estranged and he and his brother were raised by a Nanny. Young Winton began his education at 7 at St. George’s Boarding School in Berkshire, but was not particularly academic child and his general behavior got him into trouble. As a teen, Young Winston was educated at the Harrow Prep School. There he performed poorly once again, so much so that his father did not even have him apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, his father chose the military for him. After two failed attempts to gain admittance, in 1893 young Winston finally headed off to the Royal Military Academy.
After he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant, Churchill traveled the British Empire as a both a soldier and journalist. In 1896, he went to British controlled Bangalore in India. Using his families contacts in London, Churchill next got himself attached to the British campaign in the Sudan, while additionally working as a journalist for The London Morning Post.
In 1899, the Morning Post sent him to cover the Second Boer War in South Africa. After his train derailed, he was captured, but not for very long. Churchill daringly escaped through a POW camp bathroom window, then stowed away in trains to get back to British controlled territory. News of his daring escapade made him quite the celebrity back in England, which Churchill loved.
He returned to England in 1900. Now only 26, Churchill had published no less than five books on history. That same year, in a narrow victory, he joined the House of Commons as a Conservative. It was but the first step in his ultimate rise to Prime Minister during World War II and beyond.
5. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Mother Teresa was born in 1910, in Skopje, then the Ottoman Empire, now Macedonia. She was baptized Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her parents were Albanian, with her father a construction contractor. The Bojaxhius family were devout Catholics. Her father was deeply involved in the local church as well as city politics.
In 1919, when Agnes was only eight, her father suddenly became ill and died. Agnes became closer to her mother, a pious, compassionate woman. She instilled in her daughter a deep commitment to charity. Her mother often extended an open door invitation to the city’s poor to come dine with them at their home.
Agnes attended a Catholic primary school and a state-run secondary school. During a pilgrimage to the Church of the Black Madonna in Letnice, she felt a calling to religious life at only 12. In 1928 at age 18, Agnes had decided that becoming a nun was truly what she wanted. She set off for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto. It was there she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
A year later, she traveled to Darjeeling, India for the first time, as a novitiate. In 1931, after her first vows, her Order gave Anges her first assignment. They sent her back to Calcutta, as a teacher at St. Mary’s Girls High School. It was a school run by her Order and dedicated to teaching the poorest Bengali girls. Sister Teresa learned to speak fluent Hindi as she taught geography and history.
In 1937, she took her Final Vows as a nun, pledging to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, taking the title of “Mother.” By 1944, she was promoted to school principal. After World War II, Mother Teresa experienced a second calling, the “Call within a Call” that would transform her life forever. She was riding in a train to the Himalayas when she said Christ spoke to her. He told her to leave teaching and work instead in the slums of Calcutta, aiding the city’s poorest of the poor.
In January 1948, she finally received approval from the Vatican to create a new order of nuns, the Missionaries of Charity, who wore their signature blue-and-white sari. Her order has grown into the thousands since.
6. German Dictator Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, not in Germany, but rather Braunau am Inn, Austria. He was baptized Catholic by his parents. His father was a mid-level customs official who was born illegitimate, before his grandmother married. This would cause speculation for decades that Hitler’s grandfather was secretly Jewish!
Young Adolf actually wanted a career in the arts. He fought angrily with his father, who wanted him to enter the civil service like him. After his father’s death, a teenage Hitler persuaded his mother to let him to pursue becoming an artist. In 1907, Hitler took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of the Arts, but did not get accepted. A year later, after his mother’s death from breast cancer, he moved to Vienna in the hopes of trying again.
Hitler lived in Vienna for five years. He worked odd jobs and living impoverished after he used up the inheritance left to him by his parents. He continued to refuse to work in the civil service like his father. Helped financially by his aunt, he began to paint watercolor scenes of Austria and made enough to barely live on.
Adolf had grown up middle-class family, with few contacts with Jews, but shared the general anti-Semitism beliefs common amongst German nationalists. Nevertheless, he sold his watercolors to Jews in Vienna, so was at times was dependent on Jews for his living.
Hitler then moved to Munich, Germany in 1913. Ironicaly, it was to avoid arrest for dodging the military draft in Austria. He supported himself on his watercolors again, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. This time he voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army. Corporal Hitler was wounded in the Battle of Somme in 1916 and received the Iron Cross for bravery.
It was after World War I, that Hitler’s anti-Semitic beliefs grew like a cancer. He believed in the “Stab-in-the-Back” lie pushed by German Nationalist that the Jews, Socialists, and Fascists were to blame for Germany’s loss in the war and the resulting economic depression. Hitler returned to Munich and in 1919, joined the German Workers’ Party the precursor to the Nazi Party. The rest, as they say, is sadly history.
So was there some pattern in early lives of these six very different people that somehow pegged them for world prominence? Before they were famous, they each had their own struggles, whether with disabilities, family, money, or society. Each did possess a spark that could not be extinguished, no matter their adversities. They persevered and never gave up, not allowing setback to end their dreams, whether for fame, wealth, or power. Perhaps that is the lesson we can learn.