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Richard Leakey

Palaeoanthropologist and conservationist; head of the Kenya Wildlife Service

Kenya · 1944–2022

Kenyan palaeoanthropologist whose teams recovered major hominin fossils at Koobi Fora, including the Turkana Boy. He later directed the National Museums of Kenya and the Kenya Wildlife Service, where he led the campaign against the ivory trade.

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Question What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?

It’s very hard to give people advice, because you don’t know their personality. Personality is a big part of that. Everybody is faced with passing opportunities. Many people watch the opportunity come and watch it go. I say, if an opportunity comes and you have got the self-confidence, grab it. Ride it for a bit. If it’s not the right opportunity, do something else, but be positive about opportunities.

Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 21 June 2007 source ↗

Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?

So Cambridge rejected me. Quite rightly, although at the time I thought it was a little churlish. So, I had to do it without any university training. ... and I began to realize that there were probably a lot more of these things, and that if you find these things, you get a position in the ladder which you can’t get to unless you have either got an education or something else. So by finding important things, you immediately get into the game, which you’d been excluded from otherwise.

Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 21 June 2007 source ↗

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