My Path to Success

As a 27-year-old domestic policy aide to President Jimmy Carter, David Rubenstein earned a reputation for tireless dedication to his work. After leaving the White House, he brought the same inexhaustible energy to building the global private equity powerhouse known as the Carlyle Group. Over the years, former secretaries of state and defense, a former British prime minister -- even a President of the United States -- have served the group as directors or advisers. Although Carlyle earned an early reputation for expertise in defense and aerospace, its interests run the gamut: automotive and transportation, consumer and retail, energy and power, health care, telecom and media. David Rubenstein's matchless network of Washington contacts has given the Carlyle Group a powerful public image of authority and influence, but the most numerous beneficiaries of the group's investments are the millions of ordinary men and women whose pensions are invested in Carlyle funds. Rubenstein's contributions to the life of the nation's capital extend beyond the realms of business and government. He currently serves as Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In this podcast, recorded at the 2010 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rubenstein emphasizes the importance of building on one's early accomplishments, rather than resting on one's laurels.

As a 27-year-old domestic policy aide to President Jimmy Carter, David Rubenstein earned a reputation for tireless dedication to his work. After leaving the White House, he brought the same inexhaustible energy to building the global private equity powerhouse known as the Carlyle Group. Over the years, former secretaries of state and defense, a former British prime minister -- even a President of the United States -- have served the group as directors or advisers. Although Carlyle earned an early reputation for expertise in defense and aerospace, its interests run the gamut: automotive and transportation, consumer and retail, energy and power, health care, telecom and media. David Rubenstein's matchless network of Washington contacts has given the Carlyle Group a powerful public image of authority and influence, but the most numerous beneficiaries of the group's investments are the millions of ordinary men and women whose pensions are invested in Carlyle funds. Rubenstein's contributions to the life of the nation's capital extend beyond the realms of business and government. He currently serves as Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In this podcast, recorded at the 2010 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rubenstein emphasizes the importance of building on one's early accomplishments, rather than resting on one's laurels.

In Part 1 of this podcast, recorded in the Boulders Lodge of the Singita Sabi Sands Game Reserve during the 2009 International Achievement Summit, Alexander McCall Smith recounts the experiences that inspired the No. 1 Ladies books and reads aloud from the first novel in the series.

In Part 2 of this podcast, recorded in the Boulders Lodge of the Singita Sabi Sands Game Reserve during the 2009 International Achievement Summit, Alexander McCall Smith takes questions from the Academy of Achievement's student delegates, touching on the craft of fiction and his occasionally baffling interactions with the film industry.

In 2009, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected to a second term as Mayor of Los Angeles. The first Latino to lead the city in over 130 years, he was first elected in 2005, with support from every community in this most diverse of cities, second largest in the nation. As mayor, he has focused on education, transportation, public safety and economic development, and has emerged as a dynamic national spokesman for urban America. His life might have turned out very differently. A high school drop-out at 16, he was headed for trouble, but his mother would not give up on him. At her urging, he returned to school, attending night classes to finish his diploma. A sympathetic teacher saw his potential and paid his college entrance examination fees. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Villaraigosa distinguished himself as a student leader in the civil rights and antiwar movements. As a union organizer, labor leader and Speaker of the California State Assembly, he earned the admiration of allies and adversaries alike with his formidable gift for building consensus across party lines and ethnic divides. Since taking office as Mayor, he has barred lobbyists from city commissions and charged head-on at the city's most intractable challenges, including education and transportation, overcoming entrenched opposition within his own party. Here, he is heard in conversation with veteran ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson.

In 2009, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected to a second term as Mayor of Los Angeles. The first Latino to lead the city in over 130 years, he was first elected in 2005, with support from every community in this most diverse of cities, second largest in the nation. As mayor, he has focused on education, transportation, public safety and economic development, and has emerged as a dynamic national spokesman for urban America. His life might have turned out very differently. A high school drop-out at 16, he was headed for trouble, but his mother would not give up on him. At her urging, he returned to school, attending night classes to finish his diploma. A sympathetic teacher saw his potential and paid his college entrance examination fees. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Villaraigosa distinguished himself as a student leader in the civil rights and antiwar movements. As a union organizer, labor leader and Speaker of the California State Assembly, he earned the admiration of allies and adversaries alike with his formidable gift for building consensus across party lines and ethnic divides. Since taking office as Mayor, he has barred lobbyists from city commissions and charged head-on at the city's most intractable challenges, including education and transportation, overcoming entrenched opposition within his own party. Here, he is heard in conversation with veteran ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson.

Singer and songwriter Vince Gill has won 19 Grammy awards, more than any other male artist in country music. His latest release, "These Days," is a four-disc, 43 song set, showcasing his versatility in bluegrass, country, rock, folk and contemporary styles. His sweet tenor voice has made him a favorite collaborator with the biggest names in American music. He has sung with everyone from Dolly Parton to Barbra Streisand, but his favorite partner is his wife, Amy Grant. Vince Gill and Amy Grant participated in the 2009 International Achievement Summit in South Africa. This podcast was recorded during the Academy's evening program at the Ebony Lodge within the Singita Sabi Sand Private Game Reserve that concluded the 2009 Summit activities.

The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and sister, to England. At 19, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada; he has since become a Canadian citizen.

Ondaatje first won recognition as a poet. His collected poems, There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do, won the Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize, in 1979. He moved from poetry to fiction with unconventional books such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, combining prose and poetry, fact and fiction, text and image.

His masterpiece, The English Patient, is an epic romantic tragedy, set in Egypt and Italy during the Second World War. This novel pierced the hearts of readers around the world and received the Booker Prize, the highest literary honor in the British Commonwealth. The 1996 film adaptation received nine Oscars, including the year's prize for Best Picture.

Over the last 40 years, Jonathan Spence of Yale University has become the West's leading authority on Chinese history. His books, such as The Gate of Heavenly Peace and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, have brought remote times and places to life for the general reading public, while The Search for Modern China has become a standard text in universities around the world. The undergraduate course he teaches on the modern history of China is among the most popular ever given at Yale. Year after year, a new class of students packs the lecture hall to enjoy his spellbinding presentation. Born and educated in England, Spence did not discover his passion for Chinese studies until he came to Yale University, from Clare College, Cambridge, on a Mellon Fellowship. While still a graduate student, he became the first Westerner to study the confidential correspondence of the Manchu (Qing Dynasty) Emperors, preserved at the Palace Museum in Taiwan. The resulting dissertation became his first book, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master, published in 1966. The same year, Spence joined the Yale history faculty. It is Spence's distinctive achievement to make the life of a single person -- whether an emperor or a commoner -- reveal the essence of an entire era. His powers of description far exceed those of the conventional academic historian, and he brings historical figures to life as vividly as characters in a novel. Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi presents a Qing Dynasty monarch in his own words, and reached an audience beyond the world of China scholars. The Death of Woman Wang affords us a view of Qing society as seen through the lives of ordinary people, and has become a classic, read by nearly all students of Chinese history. His latest book is Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. Professor Spence lives most of the year in West Haven, Connecticut with his wife, Annping Chin, also a scholar of Chinese history. Since 1974, he has made frequent trips to China to further his research. In recent years, he has also served as a visiting professor at Beijing University.

A pioneer of molecular paleontology, Svante Paabo has developed and refined the technique of isolating and sequencing the DNA of creatures long extinct. Year after year, he is making discoveries that shed light on our own evolutionary past, and on what it means to be human. The Stockholm-born Paabo, who had once considered becoming an Egyptologist, was a Ph.D. student in molecular genetics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden when he set out to capture a DNA sample from an ancient Egyptian mummy. Extracting coherent DNA from human remains is enormously difficult, as they have usually been contaminated with bacteria and other living matter. Paabo's former Egyptology professors provided him with tissue samples, but he feared his Ph.D. advisor would disapprove of such a far-fetched project. Working in secret, he succeeded in sequencing a quantity of DNA from the mummy of a 2,400-year-old Egyptian boy, a finding he published in Nature in 1985. Over the next decade, Dr. Paabo extracted DNA from the remains of mammoths and ground sloths, cave bears and marsupial wolves. He even sequenced a DNA sample from the so-called "Ice Man," who had lain frozen in an Alpine glacier for 5,000 years. In 1996, he made headlines around the world when he succeeded in procuring a DNA sample from the 42,000-year-old remains of a Neanderthal man. Today, Dr. Paabo heads the genetics department at the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Among his first accomplishments at the institute was mapping the entire genome sequence of the chimpanzee, enabling a gene-for-gene comparison with the human genome. Further study could reveal why chimpanzees are immune to such human diseases as AIDS and malaria, and may offer hope for the treatment of speech disorders and autism. Dr. Paabo is now attempting to map the entire genome of the Neanderthal. If he succeeds, comparisons with the genome of modern humans will yield invaluable insight into our own origins, and Svante Paabo, his admirers suspect, will be due for a Nobel Prize.