The classic stories behind celebrity success

Behind every success, there is always an unknown story. How much do you know about the stories behind those successful people? I have carefully collected and compiled the stories behind the success of celebrities for everyone. Let’s take a look.

Stories behind celebrity success Part 1: Jay Chou

Jay Chou was born into a family with not very good living conditions. His parents divorced when he was 5 years old, and he stayed with his mother. (We know he has a song on "Fantasy" called "Dad, I'm Back").

Jaylen showed his unique feeling and talent for music when he was in elementary school. He liked the piano very much and liked to listen to music quietly alone. This also formed the shape we see him in now. A shy big boy character. But his academic performance is not very good, because he wants to engage in music, but music is a plaything of the rich in Taiwan. It is almost impossible for him, so many people advise him to study hard and get into a university in the future. , and it’s easier to find a job.

But what is "disappointing" is that Jaylen did not go to college, so after graduating from high school, he was introduced to a restaurant as a waiter. But he still loves his music. Although his monthly salary is only 400 yuan, in addition to supplementing his family income, he also spends a large part of it to buy cassettes. He still often listens to music quietly by himself and tries to creation. Jay said he has only cried three times so far, once when his parents were getting divorced; once when he was distracted while working in a restaurant and knocked over a plate of hot food onto a waitress. I was fined half a month's salary by my boss.

There is a piano in the restaurant, which is Jay Chou's favorite. Once, when he was not busy at work, he sat in front of the piano and played a song. The other waiters were very surprised. It happened that the boss saw it. He did not expect such an inconspicuous waiter to have such an elegant hobby. So the boss asked Jay Chou to be the pianist in the restaurant. This was a big "promotion" for Jay Chou, and his salary also increased to 1,000 yuan per month. From then on he became passionate about his work.

Jay Chou’s sister is very supportive of her brother’s music creation. Once, she signed up for Jay Chou in the "Music Newcomer King" hosted by Wu Zongxian. Wu Zongxian was a very famous musician in Taiwan at the time. When he saw Jay Chou's music score, he was very shocked because Jay Chou actually composed a complex piece of music neatly. However, because Jay Chou's music style is very weird, he was booed by many audiences during the live performance, which also dealt a big blow to Jay Chou. But Wu Zongxian liked this gentle and quiet young man very much. He asked Jay to work as a music production assistant in his "Alfa" music company, but the so-called assistant was just to help run errands. But in Jay Chou's opinion, it is a good start for him to realize his dream. From then on, he was determined to pursue the path of music creation, and when he had time, he would ask others for advice. Finally, Wu Zongxian promoted this diligent young man to a music producer. But this is a greater test for him, and he is willing to bear this test. Every morning, he neatly placed the songs he had written on Wu Zongxian's desk.

He encountered many difficulties during this process. The song he composed for Andy Lau was thrown aside by Andy Lau without even reading it. (It is said that this song was later "Xingqing"). Also, the "nunchucks" he customized for the then popular Taiwanese actress Zhang Huimei were abandoned. When he secretly saw Wu Zongxian tearing up his creative manuscript, he shed tears silently. This was the third time he shed tears. At this time, Wu Zongxian gave him one last chance, asking him to write 50 songs within 10 days, and select 10 of them for him to release an album. He knew that the boss had given him an ultimatum, and this was the critical moment that determined his life or death on the music road. Sure enough, hard work paid off. He completed the task within 10 days and successfully released his first album "Jay Zhou". From then on he also became famous.

He was only 19 years old at the time!

Stories behind celebrity success Part 2: Peter Thiel

He is a mathematical genius, a chess master, and likes Solzhenitsyn and Rand's work. 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, as well as his ability to turn stone into gold.

PayPal goes public, the first pot of gold in life

University Avenue, located in the busiest area of ??Palo Alto, is the outpost of Silicon Valley technology product launches. There is a cafe called Café Venetia on this street. Most of Peter Thiel's properties are located near Café Venetia. At first glance, the cafe's patrons are all well-dressed but energetic people using Apple devices, and their discussions are about their creative ideas and venture capital. In the summer of 1998, Max Levchin, a 23-year-old Ukrainian programmer who had just arrived in San Francisco, listened to Thiel's lecture on currency trading at Stanford University. The next day, they met in Palo Alto. They hoped to create an electronic payment system to make e-commerce transactions simple, unified and secure. This was the prototype of PayPal in the future. In 2002, Thiel met with his friend Elon Musk at this coffee shop to discuss whether to take PayPal public and reached an agreement. In the end, this electronic payment company founded in 1998 successfully went public with a market value of approximately US$1.2 billion, becoming the first large-scale IPO after the "911" incident. Subsequently, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion, and Thiel also received the first pot of gold in his life - US$55 million.

Venture capital, turning stone into gold

Thiel, who was financially free, devoted himself to venture capital. He renamed Thiel Capital Management, which he founded in 1996, Clarium Capital Management, and invested $10 million himself. Since then, Thiel has been patiently looking for promising startups. At that time, social networking, a field that few people favored, was considered to be the next dangerous Internet bubble, but Thiel remained confident. In the summer of 2004, Huffman and fellow Silicon Valley brat Sean Parker introduced Thiel to Zuckerberg, who was looking for a major investor in Facebook. Thiel provided $500,000 in start-up capital for Facebook, which was valued at less than $5 million at the time. This was the first external investment Facebook received. This investment earned him 7 shares of Facebook and became a member of the company's board of directors. Although Thiel sold nearly half of his 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 based on Facebook's market value of US$100 billion after its listing, Thiel's stock value is expected to reach US$3 billion, with a return on investment of more than 6,000 times. If Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a miracle that changed human life, then Peter Thiel, a geek born in 1964, is the driving force behind this miracle. The American Internet community once again remembered Thiel's name.

A year later, he founded Founders Fund with US$50 million, and after the establishment of the fund, he invested in a series of highly innovative startups, including YouTube and photo sharing. Software company Slide, user review website Yelp, Palantir Technologie, which develops software for detecting terrorists and financial fraud, rocket manufacturing company SpaceX, electric car company Tesla Motors and micro-lending company Kiva. These companies later proved to be very successful. It can be said that Thiel is the most successful technology venture capitalist in the world.

How to select promising entrepreneurs? Thiel said that he would ask the most important question to every entrepreneur seeking investment, and that is: "Why would a 20th employee join your company?" company?” Thiel believes: “It’s easy to understand why someone wants to be a CEO or join a startup as an early employee because they want to run a company or want to get rich by joining an early startup. It’s also easy to understand why the 1,000th employee would. Join, because it's clear that the company is on its way to growth, and you can get a steady income by joining, but the 20th employee has a lot of different meanings because when the 19th employee joins, you have the majority of the company's equity. The allocation has been completed, but the company has not yet succeeded, so your company is not a place worth joining for stable income. "I will only invest in companies that answer this question, that is, the 20th employee will join because this company is in the market." Do something completely new and different."

A complex of contradictions, "Born to Win"

Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1967, his father is a A chemical engineer, his father, Klaus, worked for several large engineering companies many times, traveling with his family all the time, and finally settled in Foster City, 20 miles south of San Francisco, USA. Thiel attended elementary school in seven different places. He eventually settled in San Francisco Bay Foster City in fifth grade. The early growth environment made Thiel full of confidence, intelligence, and also enjoyed solitude. He is a mathematical genius and a chess master who has the motto "Born to Win" on his chess equipment. As a teenager, his favorite book was "The Lord of the Rings," which he read over and over again. At the same time, he also liked the works of Solzhenitsyn and Rand. Thiel grew up in a Christian family and believed in Christianity, but in high school he began to believe in libertarianism and even became an extreme believer in libertarianism. He described his belief as "somewhat heretical" and said, "I believe in Christ. But I do not try to persuade other people to maintain the same belief as me." At the same time, as __ Thiel is also a complete Christian Homosexuality, and this is one of the concrete manifestations of Thiel's complex of contradictions that are called by the outside world. "I think in my mind, identity exists in all kinds of nuances," he said. "I think gay people, black people, and women all have a deep and different experience of this. I also think that everyone has a sense of it. The trend of exaggeration has raised it to the realm of ideology. "Obviously, Thiel is a typical combination of contradictions. He lives or does business in his own utopia and enjoys it.

The information age has brought tremendous wealth to Thiel, but he remains disappointed. He believes that the Internet technology revolution has not created enough jobs, nor has it improved the level of manufacturing and social productivity. Innovations in the virtual world cannot replace technological progress in the real world. Thiel rarely updates his Facebook page. He also "wasn't used to using a BlackBerry or an iPhone or anything like email." He didn't even start texting until a year ago.

Believe that innovation can save the world

Now, Thiel, who has already made a lot of profits in the field of social media, has a new goal? To provide funds for those "ideas that can save the world". In the words he often talks about, he must at least "raise our civilization to a higher level."

Thiel believes that almost all the problems in the world today, such as the shortcomings of government institutions and education systems, the lingering financial crisis, market bubbles, energy crises, and wars over resources, stem from the stagnation of technological innovation. , and the only way to save it can only be a dramatic scientific breakthrough. Currently, Thiel has poured money into companies focused on extending life, colonizing ocean platforms, commercializing space, friendly artificial intelligence, modifying DNA sequences to speed evolution, and other crazy ideas. Recently, his Thiel Foundation invested in another eye-popping project? A fresh meat 3D printing technology startup.

The company engaged in research on 3D printing technology for fresh meat is called Modern Meadow, located in Missouri, USA. It is said to have received a 6-digit investment from the Thiel Foundation. The company said that by specially processing and cultivating different types of special structural layers to make in vitro meat edible, it can also provide the human body with the protein it needs. The company says it is undertaking this research to reduce the environmental impact of large-scale farming. The meat currently produced is 2 centimeters long, 1 centimeter wide and half a millimeter thick. “We hope to first attract a group of early consumers who like cooking and those who are vegetarians for ethical reasons. Then, as the price gradually decreases, we will attract more religious vegetarians (such as Hindu, Jewish and Islamic vegetarians). Christians), and ultimately hope to provide safe and secure pork products to the general public.”

Currently, Thiel ranks 365th on the Forbes list with a net worth of US$1.5 billion. Thiel's contribution to the Internet industry is not only as a venture capitalist, but more importantly, his unique thinking ability. No matter what, these dreams of Thiel are all about changing the world.

Stories Behind the Success of Celebrities Chapter 3: Guo Jingjing

Guo Jingjing spent five years in Baoding Lekai Primary School. At that time Guo Jingjing joined the diving team.

At first, Guo Jingjing couldn’t straighten her knees to her toes, and her legs were extremely stiff. In order to practice ligaments, sit on the tiger bench. During a training session, Guo Jingjing broke her leg and was supposed to go home to recuperate. But coach Li Fang is afraid that she will be "distracted" when she goes back because she feels that Guo Jingjing is outgoing and not focused on training and needs constant reminders. Therefore, Li Fang asked Guo Jingjing to live and eat in the swimming pool, while recuperating and observing other people's training, mainly to keep her mind together. During that time, Guo Jingjing was lying on the small wooden bed with splints tied to her legs. While recuperating, he watched the players train and listened to the coach's speech.

Even though she was recuperating in the swimming pool, she still did her homework at night. Guo Jingjing is studying and training at the same time, and can complete her homework every day. This once made the head teacher Wu Wei very strange and asked her when it was completed. Guo Jingjing said it was time to take advantage of the break. At noon, and after training in the afternoon and before dinner, it is time to do homework. I really couldn't finish writing, so I wrote in the bathroom, because the lights in the dormitory had to be turned off at the end of the day. Regarding this, Guo Jingjing's grandmother was very proud and said, "Our Jingjing has two brains, one for diving and one for studying."

After the 1996 Olympics, Guo Jingjing broke her leg again during training. Open fracture. According to Yu Fen, the then deputy head coach of the Chinese diving team, during training, a coach of the Guangdong team turned on the light. He was about to turn on the right light, but turned off the left light. At that time, Guo Jingjing was taking off, but she lost sight of her in mid-air and stumbled. So the fracture occurred. It was quite a blow.

When seeing a doctor in Beijing, the conventional treatment is to insert steel nails and then remove them after a year. For athletes, multiple surgeries will affect training. So conservative treatment was adopted, and Guo Jingjing returned to Hebei wearing a plaster.

I broke my leg in December 1996, and October of the following year was the National Games. Guo Jingjing chose conservative treatment and spent more than 5 months healing slowly. When my legs heal, there will only be five months left before the National Games. During the period of recuperation, she grew 5 centimeters in height, gained 20 pounds in weight, and her legs were very thin.

After the injury is healed, the next step is devil training. I get up at 6 o'clock every day, practice until 8 o'clock, and then have breakfast. At noon, while others were taking a nap, she went out running in sweat clothes. Under the scorching sun, I ran on a road that was hot and reflected white light.

Continue high-intensity training in the afternoon. The summer of 1997 was also the hardest period of training for Guo Jingjing so far. Li Fang told Guo Jingjing: "You are capable of participating in the Olympics. If you give up, you will regret it for the rest of your life."

During the National Games preliminaries, she still watched the competition with crutches, and she did not have a plaster cast yet. Pick. At that time, everyone thought that it was impossible to achieve good results in the National Games in a few months. But when it comes to the National Games, it's different. Guo Jingjing lost 15 pounds. The legs are also made thicker and thinner. Guo Jingjing left a deep impression on the audience. Li Fang told reporters that even the referee said that she did not expect her recovery to be so good. Guo Jingjing, who returned from injury, won the runner-up in the 3-meter springboard. Excellent results were achieved.

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