My Path to Success

It would be difficult to name another athlete who dominated his sport as long or as completely as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The greatest all-around player in the history of professional basketball, he ruled the sport through speed, agility and a devastating ambidextrous "sky hook" shot that sportswriters dubbed "the ultimate weapon." In the three seasons he played for the UCLA Bruins, he led the team to three NCAA championships and was named Most Outstanding Player in all three years, the only player in the history of the college game to hold this distinction. As a professional, his career was even more remarkable. In his 20 seasons in the NBA, he played in 19 All-Star Games, won six championship titles and six Most Valuable Player awards. Over the course of his career, he blocked more than 3,100 shots, made 17,400 rebounds and scored 38,837 points, making him the highest-scoring player in NBA history, a record that may never be broken. Adored by his fans and revered by his teammates, he retired to the most heartfelt tributes in sports history. Since retirement, he has chosen to pursue a second career as an author, enjoying success with books on African American history, World War II, the Harlem Renaissance and his own experiences coaching basketball on an Apache Indian reservation. One of the most durable athletes in the history of any sport, he has gone on to earn the world's enduring respect for his accomplishments as a human being.

"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do." When Benjamin Carson was in fifth grade, he was considered the "dummy" of his class. His classmates and teachers took it for granted that Ben would take an entire quiz without getting a single question right. He had a temper so violent that he would attack other children, even his mother, at the slightest provocation. "I was most likely to end up in jail, reform school, or the grave," he remembers. But Benjamin Carson turned his life around. He graduated from high school with honors, went on to Yale University and to medical school. At age 32, he became Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He is internationally recognized as a pioneer in his field. In his operation on the Binder conjoined twins in 1987, he succeeded where all predecessors had failed, in separating twins joined at the head.

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 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, California, David Rubenstein gives a surprisingly humorous account of the many setbacks he encountered on his career path, from serving as an adviser to President Carter to creating the world's leading private equity firm.

The most successful motion picture director of all time, Steven Spielberg first made his name as a master showman of adventure and fantasy, with blockbusters like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET: The Extraterrestrial. He entered a new phase in his career with The Color Purple, turning to literary and historic subjects, including some of the darkest chapters in human history. His wrenching drama of the Holocaust, Schindler's List, has become a landmark of world cinema. His research on the film led him to found the Shoah Foundation. To date, the Foundation has preserved the recollections of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors whose testimony might otherwise have been lost to history. Steven Spielberg has continued to produce films at a prodigious pace, including his staggering recreation of D-Day, Saving Private Ryan. Extravaganzas like Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds proved he has not lost his touch with fantasy and science fiction, while his 2006 film Munich explores the challenge terrorism poses to civilization. His latest works find Spielberg in full command of his artistic powers, informed by a moral vision and human insight that grow deeper with the years. Here he tells the Academy of Achievement how he first fell in love with the power of the moving image. Spielberg continues to produce and direct motion pictures. He and his wife Kate Capshaw are parents, step-parents and adoptive parents to nine children.

Trisha Yearwood has been hailed as the premier pop-country interpreter of her generation. From the small town of Monticello, Georgia, she moved to Nashville at age 20 and took a job as a receptionist in a record company while recording songwriters' demo tapes for $10 a song. After six years of demo tapes, her 1991 debut album went to number two in the country charts and was certified double platinum, an unprecedented performance for a debut record by a female country artist. Her subsequent recordings saw her move from strength to strength, delving deeper into country tradition while opening her repertoire to songs from folk and pop writers. Subsequent albums have gone gold, platinum and double platinum, selling 10 million records in less than eight years. In a career spanning 20 years in the music business she has won acclaim for the honesty and sincerity of her interpretations, and for her sensitive choice of material, as well as for her warm, soaring voice. To date, she has won three Grammy Awards, Country Music Association honors, and has scored 19 top ten singles, including "She's in Love With the Boy," "Perfect Love," and "How Do I Live." In 2005 she married fellow country singer Garth Brooks. In this podcast, recorded at the 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, Trisha Yearwood performs one of her signature songs, "How Do I Live." The performance is accompanied by excerpts from the Academy of Achievement's exclusive interview with Trisha Yearwood.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Wendy Kopp created a plan to build a movement for educational equity by enlisting her generation's most promising future leaders to teach for two years in the nation's neediest urban and rural public schools. After graduation, Kopp set about making her plan a reality, founding Teach for America in 1989. With no teaching or business experience of her own, she created a multimillion dollar organization. Today, more than 3,500 corps members are teaching in our country's neediest communities, reaching approximately 300,000 students. They join more than 10,000 Teach For America alumni -- still in their twenties and thirties -- who are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. She recounts the experience in her book, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way. In her book, she not only describes how she created and built Teach For America, but also shares her thoughts about what it will take to realize her vision that one day all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. In 2004, Teach for America received a record number of 17,000 applications and is the number one employer of new graduates on some college campuses. In 2005, Wendy Kopp created a Katrina Relief Corps to serve students and communities impacted by Hurricane Katrina. In 2008 Wendy Kopp was named in Time magazine's "100 of the World's Most Influential People."

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Wendy Kopp created a plan to build a movement for educational equity by enlisting her generation's most promising future leaders to teach for two years in the nation's neediest urban and rural public schools. After graduation, Kopp set about making her plan a reality, founding Teach for America in 1989. With no teaching or business experience of her own, she created a multimillion dollar organization. Today, more than 3,500 corps members are teaching in our country's neediest communities, reaching approximately 300,000 students. They join more than 10,000 Teach For America alumni -- still in their twenties and thirties -- who are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. She recounts the experience in her book, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way. In her book, she not only describes how she created and built Teach For America, but also shares her thoughts about what it will take to realize her vision that one day all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. In 2004, Teach for America received a record number of 17,000 applications and is the number one employer of new graduates on some college campuses. In 2005, Wendy Kopp created a Katrina Relief Corps to serve students and communities impacted by Hurricane Katrina. In 2008 Wendy Kopp was named in Time magazine's "100 of the World's Most Influential People."

With his plainspoken, unpretentious style, Tim Russert transformed the landscape of broadcast news. Audiences outside Washington relied on his unparalleled insights into the Capitol scene, while Beltway insiders hailed his program as the most important hour on television. As moderator of Meet the Press, Russert interviewed every major figure on the American political scene. Week after week, he struck a delicate balance, paying due respect to his powerful guests while pressing them to answer the tough questions. Russert broke through Capitol Hill jargon to let his audience know how the issues of the day actually affected them. Critics hailed him as America's best interviewer; his colleagues called him the most influential journalist in Washington. In his best-selling memoir, Big Russ and Me, Russert entertainingly chronicled the lessons and values he learned from his blue-collar father in South Buffalo, New York. As a young attorney, Tim Russert learned the workings of government firsthand, as a Special Counsel to the United States Senate, and a trusted aide to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Formerly the Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief of NBC News, Russert took the helm of Meet the Press at the end of 1991. During his reign as host, it became the most watched of the political interview programs, and the most quoted news program in the world. Tim Russert's sudden death in June 2008 shocked the news world and his audience. He was 58 years old. Russert leaves behind a son, Luke and wife Maureen Orth of 25 years.

David Gross and Frank Wilczek were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for solving the last great remaining problem in the "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics. By discovering how the nucleus of the atom actually works, they have brought us one giant step closer to the Holy Grail of physics, the long-sought "unified theory" that would explain the relation of all known forces in the universe. For years, the Standard Model could not explain the action of the "strong force" that binds the particles in the nucleus of an atom. Whenever logical calculations of this force predicted a positive number, experiment always produced a negative one. It was Gross, then a Professor at Princeton University, and his graduate student, Wilczek, who explained this apparent contradiction. Unlike gravity and electromagnetism, which decrease with distance, the strong force tightens its grip as particles are pulled apart, and relaxes as they move together, like a rubber band. Gross and Wilczek's theory of the strong force was quickly confirmed by experimentation, and is mathematically compatible with our understanding of both electromagnetism and the "weak force" of radioactive decay. The relationship of gravity to these forces remains the missing piece of the unified theory, but when it is found, it will be thanks to the work of the greatest of physicists, among whom we must include Gross and Wilczek.

If you use the Internet, chances are you use Google every day. The search engine and the enormously successful company that shares its name were the creation of a pair of Stanford University graduate students still in their mid-20s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was Larry Page who first hit on the idea of analyzing Internet links to rate their relevance to a given information search. At first Page was only interested in writing a fun and interesting dissertation, but he soon realized his idea had far greater potential. With his classmate Sergey Brin, he presented his work to acclaim at the World Wide Web conference in 1998. Within a year they had raised over $30 million to start a company, Google Inc., providing a free Web search service that can return an ordered list of results in a fraction of a second. The simple white page with the multi-colored logo was an immediate hit with Web surfers around the world. The web site generates enormous revenue by providing advertising space, linked by content to the results of a given search. When Page took the company public in 2004, he and Sergey Brin became multi-billionaires overnight. That same year, they joined the select company of Academy of Achievement student delegates who have returned to the International Achievement Summit as honorees of the Academy. Today, Google is the most-used Web search service in the world, conducting hundreds of millions of searches a day, in over 100 languages, and has given the English language a new verb: "to Google." Larry Page and Sergey Brin have transformed the way the world accesses and uses information.