My Path to Success

The only son of a widowed immigrant mother who worked as a cleaning lady, Donald Johanson did so poorly on his SATs that his high school guidance counselor told him to forget about going to college. Johanson ignored the counselor's advice, pursued higher education, and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Within a year of earning his doctorate, Johanson made news around the world with a discovery that dramatically altered our understanding of human evolution. The fossilized bones of a creature Johanson called Lucy constitute the oldest, most complete specimen of an extinct species which was not human, but from which the human race may be descended. Dr. Johanson has become one of the dominant figures in the world of paleoanthropology, and his books and television appearances have given a mass audience a tantalizing glimpse of the mysterious origin of our species. He appeared as the on-screen host of a 13-part series for the PBS program Nature in 1982, and for the Nova series in 1994. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2001 Summit in San Antonio, Texas, Johanson retraces the path that led to his discovery of Lucy in 1974. He describes his family and childhood and considers the place of humanity in nature.

For 23 years, J. Carter Brown (1934 - 2002) served as Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., building one of the world's greatest collections of art, and keeping it available to the public, free of charge. Brown was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where his family had been prominent since before the Revolution. His father, John Nicholas Brown, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Truman. While living with his family in Washington, the young J. Carter Brown fell in love with the National Gallery of Art and first conceived of a career that would allow him to pursue his love for all the arts and to share them with a larger public. Brown spent his undergraduate years studying history and literature, and acquired a master's degree from Harvard Business School. In 1961, Brown joined the National Gallery as an assistant to the Director. Eight years later, at the age of 34, he was appointed Director. He more than tripled the Gallery's annual attendance, drawing record crowds with once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions like "The Treasures of Tutankhamun" and "Treasure Houses of Britain." He doubled the Gallery's exhibition space and massively enlarged its holdings, persuading collectors to donate their treasures to the nation. Critics howled when he commissioned architect I.M Pei to build a modern gallery alongside the existing neo-classical structure, but the result was an undisputed triumph, named by the American Institute of Architects as one of the ten best buildings ever built in the United States. After he retired from the National Gallery in 1992, he continued to chair the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and founded the cable television arts network Ovation. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2001 gathering in San Antonio, Texas, J. Carter Brown defines his work as a cultural administrator. He urges the Academy's student delegates to travel and study abroad. He stresses the rewards of community service and urges the students to embrace values other than the acquisition of material things. When J. Carter Brown died in 2002, he was not only mourned as the man who had transformed a great arts institution, but as a populist who had brought great art to the masses.

"I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online." In 1994, Jeff Bezos was a 30-year-old Vice President of a New York investment firm, newly married, with a secure and prosperous future ahead of him. He decided to give it all up and drive to Seattle with his wife, in a used car, to start a business in their garage. He was betting his own savings -- and his parents' and friends' -- on a totally untried notion: that people would buy books through a little-known network of computers called the Internet. Jeff Bezos was convinced that this global network, primarily the domain of academics and government scientists, could become a vibrant new venue for commerce, with the right product and the right plan. Almost overnight, the company Bezos started, Amazon.com, changed the book-buying habits of a nation. Bezos and his investors found their shares in the company worth billions. As the company's capitalization soared, Bezos embarked on a risky strategy of expansion, forgoing immediate profits to secure an ever-larger share of the Internet market, not only in books, but in music, videos, electronics, toys and clothing. At the turn of the 21st century, the Internet bubble burst, and fortunes seemingly made overnight vanished overnight. Yet Amazon flowed on like its mighty namesake, still expanding, but also showing profits, while other promising start-ups faded from the scene. Once-daunting competitors had become grateful partners. The vision of Jeff Bezos had prevailed, and the world of commerce had changed forever.

Most scientists would consider a Nobel Prize the crowning achievement of a life's work; Frederick Sanger has won this honor not once, but twice. He received his first Nobel in 1958 for successfully determining the exact sequence of the 51 amino acids that make up a molecule of insulin. The method he pioneered can be used for the analysis of all proteins, and made the synthesis of insulin possible for the first time, with far-reaching effects for the treatment of diabetes. Dr. Sanger then set out to do for DNA what he had done for proteins. Methods he devised have enabled scientists to determine the sequence of hundreds of base compounds in a single day, work that had previously taken years to accomplish. Dr. Sanger demonstrated his method by performing the first complete analysis of an entire organism, a microscopic bacteriophage. In 1980, Dr. Sanger received a second Nobel for this work, which lies at the heart of contemporary genetic research, such as the Human Genome Project. Only four other people in history have won two Nobel Prizes. Two were past honorees of the Academy of Achievement, John Bardeen and Linus Pauling. The others were Marie Curie and Winston Churchill. Dr. Frederick Sanger is the only living member of this illustrious company. In this podcast, recorded at the 2000 International Achievement Summit in London, England, Dr. Sanger recalls a half-century of work as a biochemist. He recalls the techniques he developed for sequencing proteins and DNA, and shares the excitement of discovery with the Academy's student delegates.

The protean musician and impresario Quincy Jones has been dubbed "a master inventor of musical hybrids," shuffling pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African and Brazilian music into unique and extraordinary musical syntheses. He began his career as a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands, at the end of the swing era, and has continued to create and thrive in the era of digital technology in music, film and television worlds. He has won international recognition as a stage performer, composer, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist, actor, record producer, motion picture and television producer, record company executive, magazine publisher and social activist. Today he stands alone as the most nominated artist in the history of the Grammy Awards, with 76 nominations, and 26 awards. Quincy Jones has also received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He has composed over 50 major motion picture and television scores, produced of the historic "We Are The World" recording (the best-selling single of all time) as well as the best-selling album in the history of the recording industry, Michael Jackson's Thriller. After over 50 years in show business, Quincy Jones has reached the essence of many different artists, and in doing so he has reached the essence of art itself; the ability to touch people's feelings and emotions. In this podcast, recorded at the 2000 International Achievement Summit in London, England, he recalls his early struggles, growing up without a mother, his discovery of music, and how filled the void in his life with positives. He traces his own journey through the worlds of music and motion pictures, and his subsequent activities as an international philanthropist.

As a boy growing up in India, Vinod Khosla dreamed of becoming a new technology entrepreneur, although his family had no business or technology connections. After graduating with a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, he moved to the United States, where he earned a master's in biomedical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an MBA at Stanford. In 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered "open systems" and RISC processors. In 1986, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he nurtured a series of innovative computer and communications start-ups. In 2004, he founded khoslaventures, to fund experimental ventures in science and social entrepreneurship. He supports numerous microfinance organizations in India and Africa and is now exploring new approaches in education, housing and alternative energy. In this podcast, recorded at a 2000 gathering of the Academy of Achievement in Scottsdale, Arizona, he recalls his youth in India and his love of reading. He shares his passion for enterprise with the Academy's student delegates, and describes the impact of emerging technologies on global culture.

For 25 years, Lute Olson was head coach of the University of Arizona Wildcats, the most successful coach in Arizona's basketball history. Robert Luther ("Lute") Olson was born on a farm in North Dakota. His father died when he was only five, and he lost a brother only six months later. His mother struggled to support the three surviving children, and Lute learned the value of hard work at an early age, but still found time to lead his high school basketball team to a state championship. He played football, baseball and basketball at Augsburg College in Minnesota, and coached high school hoops in Minnesota and California before taking his first college coaching job, at Long Beach City College, where his ream won three consecutive league titles and a state junior college championship. In 1983, when Olson rook the reigns of Arizona's Wildcats, the team was considered one of the worst in the nation. Only three years later, Olson led the team to its first Pac 10 title. For the last 20 years of his career at Arizona, The Arizona team made the NCAA tournament for the last 20 years of Olson's career, wining the championship in 1997. Lute Olson retired from coaching in 2008 after suffering a debilitating stroke. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2000 gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona, Lute Olson recounts his life and early struggles, and his lifelong enthusiasm for coaching.

Raymond Kurzweil has founded four successful businesses, all based on artificial intelligence technology he developed. He pioneered systems for optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. He developed the CCD (charge-coupled device) flatbed scanner, and the first electronic keyboard to synthesize the sounds of acoustic instruments. His interest in artificial intelligence began in high school, when he built a computer and programmed it to compose music in the style of different composers. This project won him first prize in the International Science Fair and an appearance on the television show What's My Line? As a sophomore at MIT, Kurzweil ran a business matching high school students with appropriate colleges using a program he had written. At the time, there was only one computer in New England with enough memory to run his database. Today, his scanners and OCR are standard equipment in the modern office, his synthesizers pervade popular music, his Reading Machines allow the blind to hear the contents of printed matter, and his voice recognition system is used in emergency rooms all over the United States. Kurzweil's 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines contained remarkably accurate predictions about the immediate future of technology and society. Another book, The 10% Solution For a Healthy Life, describes Kurzweil's successful effort to rid himself of Type II diabetes through a diet he researched himself, and recommends a course of action for all but eliminating the risk of heart disease and cancer. In 1999 he published the international bestseller The Age of Spiritual Machines and was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Clinton. His 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, proposes that technology will permit the extension of human consciousness beyond its present biological limits. In this 2000 address to the Academy of Achievement in Scottsdale, Arizona, he reflects on his career as an inventor, and describes impending developments in technology and their implications for human life.

Sue Grafton is one of America's most popular mystery writers, the author of a series of best-sellers known as the alphabet mysteries, beginning with "A" is for Alibi and continuing through her latest, "U" is for Undertow due out in December 2009. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky and graduated from the University of Louisville. She was always interested in writing, but feared that she could never make a living at it. Her own father had published two mystery novels but died without achieving the success he had dreamed of. "From the age of twenty-two on, I wrote at night, every night, while I was working full time and raising a family," she says. "I wrote because I couldn't help it... I wrote in the face of rejection, frustration, hardship, weariness and stress. The very act of doing what I loved gave me energy." She completed four book-length manuscripts before publishing her first novel, Keziah Dane, in 1967, followed by The Lolly-Madonna War in 1969. She wrote the screen lay for the film version of Lolly-Madonna, released by MGM in 1973. This led to a lucrative career as a writer for episodic television and made-for-TV-movies, including episodes of Rhoda, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, many written in collaboration with her husband, Steven Humphrey. By the early 1980s, Grafton had acquired a reputation in the industry for her aptitude with the murder mystery genre. She returned to the novel, creating the alphabet mystery series around a hard-boiled female private investigator named Kinsey Millhone, who lives in the fictional coastal community of Santa Teresa, California. In every day life, she is the mother of three and the grandmother of two. When she is not enjoying a garden or writing, Grafton divides her time between Louisville and Montecito, California. Her books have been published all over the world, and have won almost every award in the mystery field. When not writing her mysteries she writes and lectures on the craft of writing.

In November 2000, Dr. Ruth J. Simmons became the 18th President of Brown University; she is the first African American to preside over an Ivy League school. The twelfth child of a sharecropper turned aircraft worker, she grew up in Houston in a home without books, or even a desk. She admits she was terrified to leave home for the first time to attend Dillard University in New Orleans, but Simmons overcame her fears, excelled in college, and went on to earn a Doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University. While her teaching and research interests centered primarily on the literature of French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean, she became increasingly sought after for university administrative posts. She was serving as Vice Provost of Princeton University in 1995, when she was tapped to head Smith College, one of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, traditionally a redoubt of upper-class young women from the Northeast. As President of Smith, Simmons carried on a "personal crusade" to bring disadvantaged students to the Smith campus and others like it. This podcast was recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2000 gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona while Ruth Simmons was still President of Smith College, a few months before she was elected to lead Brown University. In her address to the Academy, Simmons relates how she fell in love with books and ideas as a child. She encourages the Academy's student delegates to pursue lifelong learning, while warning them of the dangers of arrogance. She reminds them that the wisest people they ever meet may not be the most educated. Her presidency at Brown ended on a high note. She enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating when she announced the she would resign as president, effective June 2012. Ruth Simmons remains at Brown University as a professor of comparative literature and African studies.