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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
There are certain things, like growing radishes, that technology hasn't really changed very much, but television, I feel like it was a pretty high tech business. Certainly it was in the early days of television, and I just kept up with what was going on technologically and took advantage of the new equipment and new ways of doing things from the very beginning. In business, or in life -- or in military engagements, which I'd studied a lot -- it's the old saying, "Get there firstest with the mostest," and so forth. And that's what I tried to do in business, and I did, because the record speaks for itself. I started with virtually nothing. In 1970, which was my first year in the television business, we had 35 employees at the station in Atlanta, and we did $600,000 in business. Thirty-five employees. When I merged with Time Warner in 1995, which was 25 years later, we had 12,000 employees, and we did two-and-a-half billion dollars. Instead of losing a million dollars, which we did the first year, we made close to $250 million profit, and that was in 25 years.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
I got some of the advertisers that leased the billboards over a year's period of time to prepay me, for a discount, and I sold some stock to some of the employees. I had already worked at the company for 12 years, at different parts of it. So I knew the billboard business inside and out when I was 24 years old. My father had explained how it worked to me over the years and I hit the ground running because I had already had the experience of most 40-year-old people when I was 24.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
I'd had all of the experience. I knew the business inside and out, and I had worked hard at it and studied it. It was relatively easy. It was much simpler to understand. Basically, with billboards, you go out and lease the location. In those days, we tried to pay $25 a year for a location, and then you put the billboard up, and then you went and rented it to an advertiser for $25 a month, and you maintained it. You made sure that the lights were burning at night, and that the weeds were cut in front of it and it was maintained, and hopefully, between your income and your outgo, if you could keep your signs leased most of the time, you'd make a profit. That was it. It's very simple. The television business was much more complicated because of satellite and cable TV that were brand new when I got into the business. No one had really utilized them very much, hardly at all.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: What did the Bishop see in me? I wonder. I actually do wonder. There is one thing which made me slightly different. Up to that point, not too many people with university degrees were offering themselves -- certainly in the black community -- were offering themselves for training for the priesthood. So, he might have considered me a rare catch. And, I have to say it's been an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding vocation. God has been wonderfully, wonderfully good.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
I guess when I was 10 or 11 I kind of wanted to be a lawyer like my dad. And, when I went to high school I got interested in science, and I was pretty good at it, I guess. And, it wasn't until I was actually in medical school -- even past medical school, about five years after medical school -- that I finally decided what I wanted to do. So, there was a lot of indecision. I knew I wanted to continue to learn things about science, and about eventually medicine. But, I had no formed idea of what I wanted to do until I was maybe 27, something like that.
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