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7 Americans who changed careers and then changed the world
- A common feature in lifes of many of the most accomplished Americans is failure.
- Many of those failures are instructive, and the seven figures below got many lessons in what they couldn't do before earning their fame.
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In life, as in battle, things don't always go as planned. But it's not the end of the world. No one is able to plan for every possible bump in the road.
But what we are all able, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, to do what we can with what we have where we are.
We are not the first generation to live through a significant hardship, one that had world-changing consequences. We aren't even the first generation to suffer a global pandemic and a devastating economic recession or to fight conflicts on many worldwide fronts.
What we have going in our favor is unique, however. We have access to education, skills, markets and capital that were unheard of at any other time in history.
If the "failures" of the great people who came before us can teach us anything, it's that discovering our shortcomings could help us find our true calling in life.
Bogart came from an affluent New York City family. His mother was an illustrator who later became art director of an influential New York fashion magazine while his father was a renowned cardiopulmonary surgeon.
As a young man, he attended the best private schools in New York and seemed set to follow in his father's medical footsteps.
But Bogart wasn't a great student. He dropped out of the prestigious Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and joined the Navy to fight in World War I. He never quite made it to the fighting, however.
After the Navy, he joined the Coast Guard Reserve, as well as doing other jobs and eventually started taking acting lessons. Those lessons turned into roles on Broadway and, of course, becoming the Hollywood legend we know today.
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Lincoln's military service is unique in that he served as both an officer and an enlisted person — but he was a captain before becoming a private.
During the Black Hawk War, the future president was elected to be the captain of the Illinois militia's 31st Regiment. His unit did not get to the Battle of Stillman's Run in time to fight, instead arriving to find the dead, scalped bodies of their comrades. Instead of fighting, they helped bury the dead.
Shortly after, the unit was disbanded and Lincoln re-enlisted as a private in the militia. After the Civil War, veterans who served with him would say Lincoln, though popular, had a hard time remembering the commands to give his men, among other shortcomings.
Lincoln himself would later joke that his moments of bloodshed came mostly in battle with mosquitoes.
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... or so his mother thought. In the mid-1950s, polio was ravaging the people of the United States, especially its children.
No one knew just how to prevent it, and once infected, there is no real treatment. Salk, the man who created the first effective vaccine, almost became a lawyer some 20 years before.
Instead, his mother, a Russian immigrant with little education, convinced him he wouldn't be much good at lawyering. The young Salk switched from pre-law to pre-med and helped eliminate the polio virus from the United States (and most of the rest of the world).
Although he didn't really switch careers, Walter Reed definitely took a different path. He earned two medical degrees during his civilian practice, earning his second at New York City's Bellevue Hospital in 1870.
He found urban life boring and joined the US Army Medical Corps. When an Army patient refused to allow his foot to be amputated after a fall in Nebraska, Reed was forced to save the appendage through other means. The seeds of medical investigation were planted in the young doctor.
After deploying to Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Reed would discover the vectors that spread typhoid fever among US troops and laid the groundwork for discovering that mosquitoes were the vector for spreading yellow fever.
Ray Kroc had a number of careers as a young man, including World War I ambulance driver, real estate agent and salesman for a paper cup company.
It was while working as a salesman that Kroc found his calling in life, and it had nothing to do with the milkshake machines he was peddling.
The Prince Castle milkshake mixer was losing market share to its rival Hamilton-Beach when Kroc walked into the McDonald Brothers' San Bernardino, California, burger joint. The Prince-Castle machine was perfect for the McDonald's burger stand, but the layout and workflow of the burger stand was perfect for Kroc, who had seen plenty of kitchens in his time.
Using his knowledge and experience in restaurants and real estate, Kroc built a franchising empire using the McDonald's name.
While the Walt Disney Company may have built the land of imagination at its Epcot Center theme park, Disney himself was accused of lacking imagination as a young, struggling cartoonist.
The young Disney started a number of businesses that ended in failure. He stopped working in commercial art and focused solely on cartooning, specifically in cel animation.
Disney stuck to his craft, even after losing the intellectual property rights to one of his first successful cartoons, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He soon produced the first synchronized sound cartoon featuring the debut of Mickey Mouse, and the rest is history.
Perhaps one of the most enduring political images from the 20th century is one of President Truman holding up a newspaper in the wake of his Election Day victory over New York Gov. Thomas Dewey.
Truman was widely expected to lose the election of 1948, the first since he took over the White House after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The election saw Truman beat Dewey by more than 100 electoral votes.
That was the story of Truman's entire life. The future president tried to earn an appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point but was turned down due to bad eyesight. Instead, he enlisted and passed the vision test by memorizing the eye chart. He would later be promoted to captain of his artillery company and serve with distinction in World War I.
After the war, Truman tried a number of different careers, from farming to mining to land speculation. They weren't all spectacular failures, but they were failures. He was the last president not to have earned a college degree. He took law classes but dropped out.
Instead of becoming a lawyer, he ran for election as a presiding judge in his native Missouri. From there, he would be elected a US senator, then named FDR's vice president in 1945.
When Roosevelt died in April 1945, Truman took the office. He oversaw the end of World War II, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift and the beginnings of the Cold War before all the experts predicted his political demise in the election of 1948.
— Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.
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