Top 10 Great Successful People Were Backbenchers

We often see in our society that many parents pressurize their children to achieve maximum score in the academics. Minimize the play hours and join different coaching classes so it can get more marks and get hired in a big company or in the Government. But, do really all these kids become successful in their life? Do all school and college toppers can change the world or gifted something to the world? The answer would be NO. If we evaluate the ratio of toppers and backbechers then 90% of toppers join a job and 70% backbechers start their own business let it be a small road side shop. Its true that many personality who changed the world could not complete their education. Here are Top 10 School Dropouts Became Great Successful People.

John Major- England prime Minister

The youngest British prime minister of the 20th century, John Major (born 1943)

Young Major disliked the authoritarian atmosphere of school and left at 16 to find work. His first job was a clerical position, which he soon left to pursue a more lucrative career as a construction laborer. Shortly after this change he was laid off and spent several months on the dole. These months were a formative experience for Major, who became a Conservative after deciding that socialistic paternalism only perpetuated poverty. At 18 Major found another clerical position, and this time he started a career.

George Eastman - Founder of Kodak

Named after his father, George Eastman was born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York. George Sr. had started a small business school, Eastman Commercial College, in Rochester, where he moved the family in 1860. But he died suddenly when George Jr. was 8. One of young George's two older sisters was wheelchair-bound from polio and died when George was 16.
George's mother, Mary, took in boarders to support the family, and George dropped out of high school at age 14 to add to the family income. He began as a messenger and office boy for insurance companies and studied accounting at home to qualify for a higher salary. He eventually landed a job as bookkeeper at the Rochester Savings Bank.

Ray Kroc- McDonald

Ray Kroc was an American entrepreneur best known for expanding McDonald’s from a local chain to the world’s most profitable restaurant franchise operation.

The childhood and most of the life of Kroc was spent in Oak Park, Illinois only. When Kroc was 15 years old, he was trained to become an ambulance driver during the First World War. At that time, he made friends with Walt Disney who was also getting training with him. But the war soon ended before Kroc could see the action. Between the years of the end of war and early 1950s, Kroc tried his luck at numerous trades such as paper-cup salesman, pianist, jazz musician and band member. He also attempted his fate at an Oak Park radio station. He also once worked for room and boarded at one of the restaurants of Ray Dambaugh in the Midwest in order to learn the strategies to do restaurant business,

Kroc with the passing years became a multi-mixer milkshake machine salesman and traveled all around the country.
Ray Kroc was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 5, 1902. Kroc worked as a salesman for 17 years after World War I, before becoming involved with McDonald’s in the 1950s. Kroc purchased the restaurant company in 1961, implementing automation and strict preparation standards that helped make McDonald’s the world’s largest restaurant franchise before his death in 1984, at the age of 81.

Peter Jackson- Film Director

Born on October 31, 1961, in New Zeland, Peter Jackson started his prolific career as a child, creating short films with a 8-mm movie camera.

He attended Kapiti College, a state-run secondary school, but dropped out at the age of 16 so that he could get a job to finance his film hobby.

Jackson landed a job as a photographic lithographer at a local newspaper. He worked six days a week while living at home in order to save as much money as possible to purchase a state of the art camera.  

Jackson  received a $30,000 grant from the New Zealand Film Commission that enabled him to quit his job and finish the film and then a $200,000 grant to pay for post-production. The finished picture, called Bad Taste, debuted at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, where it became a surprise hit and landed distribution deals in 12 countries.

He is best known as the director, writer and producer of

1.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03).
2.  The Hobbit trilogy (2012–14).
3.  Heavenly Creatures (1994).
4.  Forgotten Silver (1995).
5.  The Frighteners (1996).
6.   King Kong (2005).
7.  The Lovely Bones (2009).

William Faulkner- novelist

American writer William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897
 William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize–winning novelist of the American South who wrote challenging prose and created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He is best known for such novels as 'The Sound and the Fury' and 'As I Lay Dying.
As a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became somewhat indifferent to his schoolwork, even though he began to study the history of Mississippi on his own time in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then final grade, and never graduating from high school.

Li Ka-shing- Businessman

 

Sir Ka-shing Li, GBM, KBE^, JP (born 29 July 1928 in Chaozhou, China) is a Hong Kong business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. According to Forbes, as of March 2016 Li is the richest person in Hong Kong and the second richest person in Asia, with an estimated net worth of US$27.1 billion.

Li Ka-shing was born in Chaozhou in Guangdong province, China, in 1928 to Teochew parents. Due to his father's death, he was forced to leave school before the age of 15 and found a job in a plastics trading company where he worked 16 hours a day. In 1950 he started his own company, Cheung Kong Industries. From manufacturing plastics, Li developed his company into a leading real estate investment company in Hong Kong that was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1971.

Richard Branson - Founder of Virgin Group

Born on July 18, 1950, in Surrey, England, Richard Branson struggled in school and dropped out at age 16—a decision that ultimately lead to the creation of Virgin Records. His entrepreneurial projects started in the music industry and expanded into other sectors making Branson a billionaire. His Virgin Group holds more than 200 companies, including the recent Virgin Galactic, a space-tourism company. 

In March 2000, Branson was knighted at Buckingham Palace for "services to entrepreneurship". In July 2015, Forbes listed Branson's estimated net worth at US $5.2 billion.

Enzo Ferrari- Founder of Ferrari Automobiles

Enzo Anselmo Ferrari, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (18 February 1898 – 14 August 1988) was an Italian motor racing driver and entrepreneur, the founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team, and subsequently of the Ferrari automobile marque.

Ferrari was born on 18 February 1898 in Modena, Italy. His birth certificate had recorded his birth date on 20 February because a heavy snowstorm had prevented his father from reporting the birth at the local registry office. He was the younger of two children to Alfredo and Adalgisa Ferrari, after his elder sibling Alfredo Junior (Dino). Alfredo Senior was the son of grocer from Carpi and started a workshop fabricating metal parts at the family home. Enzo grew up with little formal education. At the age of 10 he witnessed Felice Nazzaro's win at the 1908 Circuit di Bologna, an event that inspired him to become a racing driver. During World War I he was assigned to the third Alpine Artillery division of the Italian Army. His father Alfredo, as well as his older brother, Alfredo Jr., died in 1916 as a result of a widespread Italian flu outbreak. Ferrari became severely sick himself in the 1918 flu pandemic and was consequently discharged from Italian service.
Following the family's carpentry business collapse, Ferrari started searching for a job in the car industry. He unsuccessfully volunteered his services to FIAT in Turin, eventually settling for a job as test-driver for C.M.N. (Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali), a Milan-based car manufacturer which redesigned used truck bodies into small passenger cars. 

Ferrari also dreamed of becoming an opera singer, but the deaths of his father and brother from the flu in 1916 forced him to grow up quickly, and he left school to become an instructor for Modena's fire service workshop. Ferrari joined the Italian Army in 1917 and shoed mules for the 3rd Alpine Artillery Division, enduring his own serious battle with the flu before earning an honorable discharge. 

Ferrari resumed designing racing cars at the conclusion of the war, and in March 1947 he took the first official Ferrari, the 125 S, out for a test-drive. The marque scored its first win that year, at the Rome Grand Prix, and went on to notch victories at the Mille Miglia in 1948, the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1949 and the British Grand Prix in 1951. 

Henry Ford- Founder of Ford

 

 Born on July 30, 1863, near Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford created the Ford Model T car in 1908 and went on to develop the assembly line mode of production, which revolutionized the industry. As a result, Ford sold millions of cars and became a world-famous company head. The company lost its market dominance but had a lasting impact on other technological development and U.S. infrastructure.

When Ford was 13 years old, his father gifted him a pocket watch, which the young boy promptly took apart and reassembled. Friends and neighbors were impressed, and requested that he fix their timepieces too.

In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. After his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893, he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on gasoline engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of a self-propelled vehicle which he named the Ford Quadricycle. He test-drove it on June 4. After various test drives, Ford brainstormed ways to improve the Quadricycle.

After a few trials building cars and companies, in 1903, Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company. Ford introduced the Model T in October of 1908, and for several years, the company posted 100 percent gains.

Steve Jobs- Co-Founder of Apple Inc.

Steven Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. He grew up with one sister, Patty. Paul Jobs was a machinist and fixed cars as a hobby. Jobs remembers his father as being very skilled at working with his hands.
In 1961 the family moved to Mountain View, California. This area, just south of Palo Alto, California, was becoming a center for electronics. Electronics form the basic elements of devices such as radios, televisions, stereos, and computers. At that time people started to refer to the area as "Silicon Valley." This is because a substance called silicon is used in the manufacturing of electronic parts.
As a child, Jobs preferred doing things by himself. He swam competitively, but was not interested in team sports or other group activities. He showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. He spent a lot of time working in the garage workshop of a neighbor who worked at Hewlett-Packard, an electronics manufacturer

Jobs's adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993), grew up in a Calvinist household, the son of an "alcoholic and sometimes abusive" father. The family lived on a farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Paul, ostensibly bearing a resemblance to James Dean, had tattoos, dropped out of high school, and traveled around the midwest for several years during the 1930s looking for work. He eventually joined the United States Coast Guard as an engine-room machinist. After World War II, Paul Jobs decided to leave the Coast Guard when it docked in San Francisco. He made a bet that he would find his wife in San Francisco and promptly went on a blind date with Clara Hagopian (1924–1986). They were engaged ten days later and married in 1946.