Famous People / Profiles

Dale Carnegie was born Dale Breckenridge Carnagey on a Missouri farm in 1888 and worked his way through college before a string of unsuccessful sales jobs and a failed attempt at acting. His break came almost by accident: teaching a public-speaking class at a New York YMCA in…

James Clear was born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1986. A standout high school baseball player, he was struck in the face by a swung bat during a game — an injury severe enough to briefly stop his breathing — and spent a long, difficult stretch relearning basic physical and cognitive…

Jim Collins was born in 1958 in Aurora, Colorado, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematical sciences and an MBA, both from Stanford, before returning to Stanford's business school as faculty — teaching and researching entrepreneurship and organizational performance and…

Morgan Housel studied economics at the University of Southern California, graduating in 2008 just as the 2008 financial crisis was unfolding — timing that shaped his lasting focus on how ordinary people actually behave with money under stress, rather than how textbook models say…

Peter Lynch was born January 19, 1944, in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, an accountant, died of brain cancer when Lynch was a boy, and Lynch worked as a golf caddie from his early teens to help support the family — a job that, by his own account, gave him his first informal…

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in his parents' garage in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, was forced out of the company he started in 1985 after a boardroom power struggle, and returned in 1997 to lead one of the most consequential turnarounds in business history. In between, he founded…

Angela Duckworth was born in 1970 and grew up near Philadelphia, the daughter of a chemist. She earned an undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude, then won a Marshall Scholarship to complete a master's in neuroscience at Oxford. Rather than…

Robert Cialdini is a social psychologist and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, born April 27, 1945. He built his reputation on field-based research into persuasion rather than laboratory studies alone — most famously going…

Susan Cain was born in 1968 and grew up in Lawrence, New York, the youngest of three children in a family that included a rabbi grandfather and a physician father. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton in 1989 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1993,…

Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905, corresponded with Sigmund Freud as a teenager, and studied under Alfred Adler before breaking from both to develop his own approach to psychiatry. He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1930, specializing in…