Physician and inventor; builder of the first practical artificial kidney
By the way, the guys with very high grades are not necessarily the people that are the most successful in later life.
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement
Starting out
For somebody at the beginning of something — still at school, newly qualified, or one week into work they do not yet understand. Mostly people looking back at who they were, which is the only vantage from which this advice is any good.
153 people · 202 answers
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Novelist and essayist
All over the world, girls are raised to be make themselves likeable, to twist themselves into shapes that suit other people. Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don’t do it.
Recorded · Wellesley College · 2015
Civil-rights activist
The advice I would give any young person is, first of all, to rid themselves of prejudice against other people and to be concerned about what they can do to help others.
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 1995
Engineer and designer; led the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple, founder of Nest Labs
Learn by doing, not learn first, then do. The way you discover what it is you like to do in life is by doing first, then learning about it.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2016
President of Toyota Motor Corporation, 2009–2023; chairman from 2023
Don't screw it up. Don't take it for granted. Try new things, even if you're old. Do the right thing, because if you do the right thing, the money will follow. Decide what you stand for.
Recorded · Babson College (Babson Thought & Action) · 2019
Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
When I went through school, I was in a hurry. I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I was a finance major in graduate school.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1991
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Irish professional boxer; Olympic champion 2012
I have never felt the need to trash talk, and I'm not going to start now! I just quietly do my job and then quietly step into the ring to showcase what I can do.
Recorded · RTÉ · 2025
Jazz tenor saxophonist and composer
The life of a jazz musician is a difficult life, because you want to play, you want to be, you want to get to the inner spirit and sometimes you drink or you use drugs or you smoke a lot.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement (achievement.org)
Co-founder and chief executive of Dropbox
I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't?
Recorded · MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2013
Mathematician; Fields Medallist, 2006
AI without validation is too unreliable to be of use in any serious application.
Recorded · Quanta Magazine · 2026
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
Most investors, of course, have not made the study of business prospects a priority in their lives.
Recorded · Berkshire Hathaway Inc. · 2014
Co-founder and former chief executive of Spotify
Many people talk about a willingness to have failures. I hate failures. I don't think you should strike to make failures.
Recorded · Music Ally · 2016
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Graphic designer
When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness…
Recorded · Psychology Today · 2009
British swimmer; Olympic champion 2016 and 2021
When I lost that 100m final I spiralled. I went quite aggressive. It is an Adam I don't really recognise.
Recorded · BBC Sport · 2024
Film director, photographer and installation artist
I have never made any money from my films but I have won prizes and recognition. I have been on the margins forever.
Recorded · Eye For Film · 2018
Engineer and designer; led the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple, founder of Nest Labs
I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today?
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2016
Executive editor of The Washington Post, 1968–1991
We made one mistake in a story in which we said that — Woodward and Bernstein said — that there was a slush fund of $300,000 set up in the Committee to Re-elect the President, and it was…
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 2003
Former chief operating officer of Facebook; founder of LeanIn.org
Day one of my first job out of college, my boss found out that I didn't know how to enter data into Lotus 1-2-3. That's a spreadsheet—ask your parents.
Recorded · Los Angeles Times · 2016
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Founder of the Green Belt Movement; Member of Parliament for Tetu, Kenya, 2002–2007; Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources 2003–2005
Tree planting became a natural choice to address some of the initial basic needs identified by women.
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 2004
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
Sherry offered me a list of research options: the one project that intrigued me the most consisted of finding out the environmental fate of certain very inert industrial chemicals – the…
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2007
Founder, chairman and chief executive of Rakuten
In Rakuten's case, adjustment certainly took time. At first, meetings often felt awkward.
Recorded · Toyo Keizai
Novelist and screenwriter
The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life.
Recorded · Harvard Gazette · 2008
Chef and restaurateur
My training took seven years. I didn’t learn how to make sushi for the first three years. I only got two days off a month, and slept on the restaurant floor. But I loved the job.
Recorded · The Observer / The Guardian · 2025
Architect; Pritzker Prize laureate, 1995
More than 500 children under the age of 18 lost a parent in the Hanshin Earthquake; 88 of them lost both parents and became orphans.
Recorded · The Hyatt Foundation / The Pritzker Architecture Prize · 1995
What is the book you have given most as a gift, and why?
Pharmaceutical chemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2015
In Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (肘后备急方), I noticed one sentence "A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all" (青蒿一握,…
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2015
Novelist and critic
Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2010
Co-founder of Coursera and of Google Brain; founder of DeepLearning.AI
Over the years, I have found a few resources for developing personal productivity that I love.
Recorded · DeepLearning.AI · 2020
Co-founder of Microsoft; co-chair of the Gates Foundation
I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun.
Recorded · TIME · 2017
Economist and philosopher; laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998
It was not long after Kenneth Arrow's path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy…
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 1998
Stem cell biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2012
A book also pushed me to become a medical doctor.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2012
What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself?
Photojournalist and war photographer; Pulitzer Prize winner, 2009
My parents also said, “Don’t follow money. Follow your heart and you’ll be successful.” That’s all they told me and my sisters.
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 2017
Conductor; Music and Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Maestro Abreu always said something very, very beautiful.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement (achievement.org)
Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1991
Baseball centre fielder; twice National League Most Valuable Player
My father said to me, “You need a piece of paper to go into a door sometimes.” I didn’t understand about résumés, but when you write a résumé you have to put down things that people want to…
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1996
39th President of the United States, 1977–1981; Governor of Georgia 1971–1975
I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman.
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 2002
Game designer; co-creator of Exploding Kittens
There’s a few that are immediate, because he just drilled them into my head. One is “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.” Try as hard as you want to market something, get a crowd.
Recorded · The Tim Ferriss Show · 2023
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