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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
We lived in the inner city, single parent home, dire poverty, my mother only had a third grade education. I was perhaps the worst student you've ever seen. I thought I was really stupid. All my classmates and teachers agreed, and my nickname was "Dummy." But, fortunately I continued to hold onto that dream and, you know, when I was in the fifth grade, my mother put us on this reading program and said we had to read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read, but we didn't know that, and she'd put a little check mark on them and act like she was reading them.
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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
But, one time I couldn't get a job, even that way, it was so bad. And, my creativity, I guess, went into another gear, and I decided to go to the Young and Rubicam Company. When I was applying to college, I had done my regional interview there, and I knew that the Executive Vice President would remember me, 'cause he had done my interview. So, I went up to the penthouse suite, waited 'til his secretary turned her back, and darted into his office. And he said, "Benjamin, how are you? How are things at Yale?" And, I said that "Things are wonderful, but I can't find a job this summer." And he said, "Did you try our personnel office?" I said no. Actually I had tried it. And, he said, "I'll tell you what." He picked up the telephone, and he called the personnel director. He says, "I know we're not hiring this summer, but I have a young man here, and I'm going to send him down. I want you to give him a job."
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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work. He didn't give up, and along with his right-hand man, Lewis Lattimer, they eventually came up with a successful light bulb. There's a cleaning formula called Formula 409. Of course, the reason they call it that is because the first 408 didn't work, but they didn't give up and they kept going. I always say, "If something doesn't work out, make sure you analyze it and try to find out why it didn't work and don't repeat that." It's like people who are always late. You can always count on them being late. They never seem to learn that if you get organized and you leave 15 minutes earlier, you won't be late. They just don't seem to be able to understand that. And, a person who can learn from their mistakes is a person who is going to be successful.
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Jimmy Carter
Nobel Prize for Peace
I ran for the governorship in 1966 and lost. It was the first real defeat in my life. At everything else I had been successful. Whenever I wanted something in the Navy, I got it because I was an outstanding officer. I worked hard. So that was a very serious blow to me. I was very distressed. And my sister, whose name is Ruth Stapleton, was a famous evangelist. She wrote four or five books, and she would give lectures to 50,000 people at a time. She and I had a long walk in the woods on my farm, and she said, "Jimmy, quite often, when you have a blow to your pride and a horrible defeat, you can either give up, or you can look on it as a way that God opens to you to do different and even better things." And I said, "Ruth, I've been defeated for governor in Georgia. My political career is over. I don't have any future." But it proved to be wrong. And then of course, I was defeated in 1980 again for re-election after reaching the highest levels of political achievement in the world. And I thought we were in desperate straits then. I found out I was in debt. I had put all my financial resources in a private trust. And I didn't let them communicate with me. After I was defeated for re-election, I found out that instead of being a fairly wealthy person, I was a million dollars in debt. And I thought I was going to have to sell all my farms and everything in order to pay off my debts. But I've managed to pay them off now, and we have as exciting and challenging and vigorous and adventurous and gratifying a life here at the Carter Center as I ever had before in my life.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
This Atari video game platform really struck me as interesting, so I joined a company in Washington, D.C. in early 1983. Unfortunately, by the time they actually shipped their product in the fall of 1983, the Atari video game market blew up and all the companies -- K-Mart and everybody which was ordering lots of these game cartridges -- suddenly was sending them all back, and the companies that were in that business, including Atari, were on the brink of bankruptcy. So this wonderful product called Game Line was a great idea, but really, really badly timed and the company essentially went into kind of free fall and had to go through several rounds of layoffs and just looked fairly bleak. But, the good news is -- in addition to getting planted in the interactive industry and moving to Washington, D.C. -- two of the people that were part of that company and I ended up in early 1985 starting what became America Online: Jim Kimsey on the business side and Marc Seriff, who is more on the technology side. I was coming at it more from a marketing side.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
"Okay. Well, this particular product at this particular time, I guess it wasn't meant to be." But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen. So I said, "Well, let's figure out another way to come at this." And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth. When we launched this company in 1985 we decided to partner with PC companies and use their brands and have them take the lead and spend the money. So we focused on the product and the underlying technology and the service and let other people take the lead on the marketing.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
I think a lot of people, friends included, were saying, "I know you're a believer in this and all, but you know, sometimes no matter how hard you believe it just doesn't happen. Maybe you should kind of give up the ghost and try something else." But I just believed, and so I kept doing it. I just viewed each of these setbacks as a challenge, and that we wanted to stay in the game. In fact, I think because there were some of these challenges I just redoubled my own commitments. "We're going to make this happen." We were going to stick with it, and the team that we built at AOL shared the passion about this new medium and that we really were pioneers in building something. And what was fun about it is nobody knew what to do and you kind of had to make it up as you go, and that means you're going to make mistakes, and you've got to keep picking yourself up off the floor and keep going.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
I think the support of the other team at AOL and everybody's really shared passion and belief about this and -- saying that some day everybody was going to be on line. Some day we were going to be living in a more interactive world. Some day people would feel like they're part of an electronic community. I think just that vision of that, that some day that was going to happen, I think, propelled us. There was many who had questioned whether we would even be around when that happened, but I think most people believed, even the cynics, that probably some day that would happen. And we said, "Well, rather than just sit by and wait, or fold our tent and go do something else, let's keep at it. Maybe we can be the ones who can figure this out," and eventually we were.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly. What happened then was it's been 10 or 15 years just slogging away at this, and there were many times where it wasn't clear at all it was going to ever happen. So, finally it broke through. So, I think for me it was -- I was overestimating the pace at which it would happen early on, and then I -- and I less than most because I was a believer -- was sort of underestimating exactly when it would happen. And if you look at history of the diffusion of technology, the diffusion of innovation, that almost always happens. People in the early stage -- it goes from nobody knows about it to suddenly they're aware of it and think it's going to happen overnight. It almost never happens overnight, so then there's a period of reflection and disappointment. Sometimes even depression, where someone says, "Oh, it's never going to happen!" and then suddenly the pieces start falling together, and then it takes off and really hits a tipping point where you see the real explosive growth.
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