timelines of success
Jun. 18th, 2014 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraWho is the most famous/successful person from your high school class, or rather, in what field are they successful, and how long after graduation did that success begin to become apparent? For bonus points, how easily could you imagine a story where it happened earlier?
A couple of examples of the sort of thing I'm looking for: the most successful person from my high school (class of 1996) is a programmer/business management theorist who wrote a non-fiction best seller in 2011 and has been in the NYT, Wired, etc. He was on a list of BusinessWeek young tech entrepreneurs in 2007. He's said on his blog he didn't start forming his theories until he'd gone through a few rounds of startup success and failure, and I feel like a significantly younger business guru (like, early 20s) would strain plausibility a bit.
Meb Keflezighi was a year above me and just won the Boston Marathon; he got an Olympic silver in 2004 when he was about 29. Of course many Olympians are quite young.
Adam Lambert graduated from high school in 2000 and became nationally famous when he was on American Idol in 2009. People have won American Idol as young as 17; maybe Lambert personally needed that time to mature as a singer or whatever, but I feel like you could very easily tell a story about someone similar becoming a music celebrity right out of high school.
(If you are tempted to answer that you're pretty sure this one really chill guy has found lasting inner peace, or that you never thought of it as a competition and what even is success anyways, this thread is not for you. I'm sort of vaguely working on some character development for an original work, in which it's important that one of the secondary characters has achieved some culturally normative success, but it doesn't really matter much exactly what it is, except for how it pins down the timeline/determines everyone's age. For awhile this character was going to be in bioscience or biotech, putting everyone somewhere in their late 20s by the time Dr. Successful finishes their PhD and does something that could have an overblown magazine article written about it, but lately I've been thinking I might want to rethink the whole thing and have everyone in their early 20s instead, which rules a lot out. (In an even earlier version, this character was a hotshot young lawyer defending the oppressed, but law school isn't much shorter than a PhD, and Sarah Weddington for instance, the real youngest person to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, was 27 at the time (representing Roe in Roe v. Wade awesomely enough).)
The obvious choices for younger success seem like music, sports, and acting - music's not bad, but I kind of want something that implies more creativity or lasting contribution to the world than just celebrity. And I'm not necessarily looking for "one in a million" levels of success, just "one in a thousand". So tell me about some real-life successful people and the nature of their success.)
A couple of examples of the sort of thing I'm looking for: the most successful person from my high school (class of 1996) is a programmer/business management theorist who wrote a non-fiction best seller in 2011 and has been in the NYT, Wired, etc. He was on a list of BusinessWeek young tech entrepreneurs in 2007. He's said on his blog he didn't start forming his theories until he'd gone through a few rounds of startup success and failure, and I feel like a significantly younger business guru (like, early 20s) would strain plausibility a bit.
Meb Keflezighi was a year above me and just won the Boston Marathon; he got an Olympic silver in 2004 when he was about 29. Of course many Olympians are quite young.
Adam Lambert graduated from high school in 2000 and became nationally famous when he was on American Idol in 2009. People have won American Idol as young as 17; maybe Lambert personally needed that time to mature as a singer or whatever, but I feel like you could very easily tell a story about someone similar becoming a music celebrity right out of high school.
(If you are tempted to answer that you're pretty sure this one really chill guy has found lasting inner peace, or that you never thought of it as a competition and what even is success anyways, this thread is not for you. I'm sort of vaguely working on some character development for an original work, in which it's important that one of the secondary characters has achieved some culturally normative success, but it doesn't really matter much exactly what it is, except for how it pins down the timeline/determines everyone's age. For awhile this character was going to be in bioscience or biotech, putting everyone somewhere in their late 20s by the time Dr. Successful finishes their PhD and does something that could have an overblown magazine article written about it, but lately I've been thinking I might want to rethink the whole thing and have everyone in their early 20s instead, which rules a lot out. (In an even earlier version, this character was a hotshot young lawyer defending the oppressed, but law school isn't much shorter than a PhD, and Sarah Weddington for instance, the real youngest person to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, was 27 at the time (representing Roe in Roe v. Wade awesomely enough).)
The obvious choices for younger success seem like music, sports, and acting - music's not bad, but I kind of want something that implies more creativity or lasting contribution to the world than just celebrity. And I'm not necessarily looking for "one in a million" levels of success, just "one in a thousand". So tell me about some real-life successful people and the nature of their success.)
