Life Story Of Hugh Herr

BEFORE:

A prodigy rock climber, by age eight he had scaled the face of the 11,627-foot Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies, and by 17 he was acknowledged to be one of the best climbers in the United States. In January 1982, after having ascended a difficult technical ice route in Huntington Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, Herr and a fellow climber Jeff Batzer were caught in a blizzard and became disoriented, ultimately descending into the Great Gulf where they passed three nights in −29 °C degree temperatures. By the time they were rescued, the climbers had suffered severe frostbite. Both of Herr’s legs had to be amputated below the knees; his companion lost his lower left leg, the toes on his right foot, and the fingers on his right hand.

AFTER:

While a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in biomedical devices, he began working on advanced leg prostheses and orthoses, devices that emulate the functionality of the human leg. Using specialized prostheses that he designed, he created prosthetic feet with high toe stiffness that made it possible to stand on small rock edges the width of a coin, and titanium-spiked feet that assisted him in ascending steep ice walls. He used these prostheses to alter his height to avoid awkward body positions and to grab the hand and foot holds previously out of reach. His height could range from five to eight feet.

As a result of using the prostheses, Herr climbed at a more advanced level than he had before the accident, making him the first person with a major amputation to perform in a sport on par with elite-level, able-bodied persons.

Also Read Bear Gryll's Life Story

Bear Gryll's Life Story

BEFORE:

After leaving school, he briefly considered joining the Indian Army and hiked in the Himalayan mountains of Sikkim and West Bengal. Eventually, he joined the Territorial Army and, after passing selection, served as a reservist with the SAS in 21 SAS Regiment (Artists) (Reserve), for three years until 1997.

In 1996, he suffered a free-fall parachuting accident in Zambia. His canopy ripped at 16,000 ft, partially opening, causing him to fall and land on his parachute pack on his back, which partially crushed three vertebrae. He later said: “I should have cut the main parachute and gone to the reserve but thought there was time to resolve the problem”. According to his surgeon, he came “within a whisker” of being paralyzed for life and at first it was questionable whether he would ever walk again. He spent the next 12 months in and out of military rehabilitation.

AFTER:

In a showcase of what pure determination and hard work can do, on 16 May 1998 he achieved his childhood dream climbed to the summit of Mount Everest, 18 months after breaking three vertebrae in a parachuting accident.

At 23, he was at the time among the youngest people to have achieved this feat. This is the inspirational story of the amazing Bear Grylls. He is known to the world as a television presenter for the Discovery Channel, with his own show called Man Vs. Wild.

Also Visit Life Story Of Barack Obama

Life Story Of Barack Obama

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the US Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for president. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.

When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on securing legislation on immigration reform and gun control, neither of which he was able to achieve. When the Republicans won the Senate in 2014, Obama refocused on actions that he could take unilaterally, invoking his executive authority as president. In foreign policy, Obama concentrated during the second term on the Middle East and climate change.

Obama left the presidency, at age fifty-five, after his constitutionally limited two terms ended on January 20, 2017. He announced plans to remain in Washington, DC, until his younger daughter finished high school and, as a former president, to play a restrained but active role in public affairs. He also devoted energy to raising money and planning for the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois.

Short Biography Of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, in full Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, (born May 14, 1984, Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S.), American computer programmer who was cofounder and CEO (2004– ) of Facebook, a social networking Web site.

After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University in 2002. On February 4, 2004, he launched thefacebook.com (renamed Facebook in 2005), a directory in which fellow Harvard students entered their own information and photos into a template that he had devised. Within two weeks half of the student body had signed up. Zuckerberg’s roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, helped him add features and make the site available to other campuses across the country. Facebook quickly became popular as registered users could create profiles, upload photos and other media, and keep in touch with friends. It differed from other social networking sites, however, in its emphasis on real names (and e-mail addresses), or “trusted connections.” It also laid particular emphasis on networking, with information disseminated not only to each individual’s network of friends but also to friends of friends—what Zuckerberg called the “social graph.”

In the summer of 2004 the trio moved their headquarters to Palo Alto, California, where Zuckerberg talked venture capitalist Peter Thiel into giving them seed money. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on the fledgling company, of which he became CEO and president. In May 2005 Facebook received its first major infusion of venture capital ($12.7 million). Four months later Facebook opened to registration by high-school students. Meanwhile, foreign colleges and universities also began to sign up, and by September 2006 anyone with an e-mail address could join a regional network based on where he or she lived. About that time Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo!, but in 2007 Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft in which the software company paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook; two years later Digital Sky Technologies purchased a 1.96 percent share for $200 million. In 2008 Zuckerberg’s new worth was estimated at about $1.5 billion. After Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) of stock in 2012, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at more than $19 billion.

Life Story Of George Soros

George Soros is a self-made billionaire known for his investment savvy and his vast body of philanthropic work.

Introduction

Born in Budapest, Hungary, on August 12, 1930, George Soros survived Nazi occupation followed by Communist-rule in Hungary in the mid-1940s and emigrated to London. There he studied economics and after earning his degree, moved to New York City in 1956, where he entered a life of finance. He began his renowned philanthropic efforts in 1979, and as of 2012 his lifetime giving amounted to more than $7 billion via his Open Society Foundations.

Past

George Soros was born Gyorgy Schwartz in Budapest, Hungary, on August 12, 1930, to parents Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz. To avoid growing anti-Semite persecution, his father changed their surname to Soros in 1936. As a teenager, he survived the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary in 1944. 

After WWII ended, Soros emigrated from the then-Communist-dominated Hungary in 1947 and made his way to England. There, at the London School of Economics, Soros began studying Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which explores the philosophy of science and serves as Popper’s critique of totalitarianism. The essential lesson the book imparted to Soros was that no ideology owns the truth, and that societies can flourish only when they operate freely and openly and maintain respect for individual rights—thoughts that would deeply influence Soros for the rest of his life.

Success

Soros graduated in 1952, and in September 1956 he sailed to New York and took a job at Wall Street brokerage firm F.M. Mayer. After working for a few more firms, in 1973 Soros set up his own hedge fund (the Soros Fund, soon after renamed the Quantum Fund and later the Quantum Fund Endowment) with $12 million from investors. The fund, with Soros at the helm, found massive success through its various iterations, and as of September 2015, Soros, at 85 years of age, was deemed as the 21st richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $26 billion.

Activities and Controversies

George Soros began his philanthropic activity in 1979, and he established the Open Society Foundations in 1984. The foundations fund a range of global initiatives “to advance justice, education, public health, business development and independent media.” The causes Soros helps with his foundations are numerous (the foundations’ list of activities goes on for 500 pages), but they include aiding in regions struck by natural disaster, establishing after-school programs in New York City, funding the arts, lending financial assistance to the Russian university system, fighting disease and combating “brain drain” in Eastern Europe.

While a towering figure in the philanthropic world, George Soros is also a provocative figure. Among his controversial positions are that he supports altering the United States’ “war on drugs” to avoid the current extent of criminalization; he was involved in and profited heavily from the U.K. currency crisis of 1992 (dubbed Black Wednesday); he has written several books on the looming collapse of the financial markets (and certain observers accuse him of manipulating the markets to reach his ends); and he has said that policies of the United States and Israel have given rise to global anti-Semitism.

Appearing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2018, Soros called for stricter regulations on Facebook and Google.

"They claim they are merely distributing information," he said. "But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access."

Soros also suggested the tech behemoths could "compromise themselves" to enter the Chinese market, thereby melding corporate surveillance with state-sponsored surveillance to produce "a web of totalitarian control." 

Controversial or beloved, with his countless organizations (through which he shapes public policy and undertakes vast humanitarian projects), financial empire and the 14 books he’s written on subjects ranging from the war on terror to global capitalism, George Soros is an influential figure and a giant in finance and the realm of philanthropy.

Life Story Of Christ Gardener

 Chris Gardner : Once The Man Without Shelter Now Provides Shelter

 One of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories is that of Chris Gardner, an American multi-millionaire stockbroker and motivational speaker, who had a troubled childhood, growing up with three half-sisters and an abusive step father in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Chris, who became famous after a movie based on his life starring Will Smith was released in 2006, is now reportedly worth $60 million.

He was able to rise above all the hardships, and achieve success in life because he always remembered his mother Bettye Jean’s words, “Son, if you want to, one day you could make a million dollars.”

He shares his story in a book titled ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ that he has co-written with Quincy Troupe.

Chris grew up in a tough black neighborhood, where he admits to having smoked marijuana, stolen things, and got into fights.

Until he was in his twenties, he had not seen his biological father, Thomas Turner, whom he finally located to introduce him to his toddler son. When he was a kid, his step father Freddie Triplett always hurt him saying that he was not his dad and used to beat him often.

Chris was so angry with Freddie that he planned to kill him, but mercifully failed to achieve his goal. His mother was sent to prison after she allegedly tried to burn the house when Freddie was sleeping inside.

Chris managed to stay positive at all times, even though he had been in situations like once when his gun-wielding step father threw him out of the house during one Christmas.

“I was put out of the house, butt naked, at gun point. To this day, I still have a problem with Christmas…

“(But) I made a decision that I was going to be everything that this guy was not. I am not going to drink, I am not going to beat women, I am not going to be ignorant.

“One of the tactics that I developed as a young kid was I would read out aloud and I will be saying to the sky that you can beat me down, you can beat me, you can beat my mom, you can put us out of here, put a gun, but I can read. I am going places,” he told Channel 20/20 in an interview.

Both Chris and his mother loved reading. They were fans of Reader’s Digest and would read the magazine cover to cover. Chris would visit the public library and spend hours reading the books there.

As a teenager Chris had done odd jobs like washing dishes at a restaurant, and attending to elderly patients at a nursing home, where he used to handle their bed pans.

After high school at age 18 he joined the US Navy with the hope of seeing the world. However, he got posted at the US Navy Hospital Corps School in Great Lakes, Illinois, where he received training in the basics of first-aid and later served at the Navy Regional Medical Center, Jacksonville.

Post his stint in the navy, he worked at a research lab in San Francisco and seriously considered getting professionally qualified as a doctor. He also worked part time as a security guard, and took up painting jobs in the weekends to earn some extra bucks.

However, he was nowhere close to achieving his dream of making big money when his son Christopher Jarrett Medina Gardner Jr. was born on January 28, 1981.

Under pressure to earn more, he took up a job as a sales representative in CMS, a medical equipment company for an annual salary of around $30,000 and later joined their competitor Van Waters and Rogers.

But his meeting with a man who owned a red Ferrari 308 changed his life after he asked the latter two simple questions: ‘What do you do?’ and ‘How do you do that.’ He learned that the man, Bob Bridges, was a stock broker and he earned $80,000 per month.

Suddenly it dawned on him that this was the job that would make him a millionaire. He determinedly pursued his goal, though he was told that most people in Wall Street were MBAs. He eventually joined Dean Witter as a trainee for a monthly stipend of $1,000.

He encountered some of the greatest difficulties in his life during this period when as a single parent he had to look after his toddler son. Chris recounts in his book how he was homeless, and had slept with his son even in a public bathroom in a railway station on many occasions.

From Dean Witter he moved to Bear Stearns, where his earnings kept increasing until he made his first million dollars in 1985.

In 1987, he founded his own brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Company. On making positive choices in life, he told in an interview to BBC, "I chose light, from my mother, and from others with whom I don't share a single drop of blood, and I embraced it."

This Article is Part of the Series ‘World’s Biggest Entrepreneurs’

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