timelines of success

[psocoptera]

Who 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.)

Comments

[irilyth]

> 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.

Is the upshot of that comment that you're *not* looking for people in music, sports, or acting?

I haven't kept enough in touch with anyone from my high school to know what all they've accomplished, except for the ones who are famous, who are mostly sports and music celebrities. :^) (Ben Harper and Dan McGwire were around my time, both a little older.)

Huh, the source of all world knowledge knows everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_High_School_%28Claremont,_California%29#Notable_alumni -- there's a scientist and a business person in there, along with a bunch of sports and music and acting people. I can't tell when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thum really "made it big"; and the scientist, a toxicologist, is mostly notable for having poisoned her husband, rather than for her scientific contributions. :^p

[glassonion]

Are you ruling out tech people? The Facebook guys seem to have become billionaires in their mid-to-late 20s --- Zuckerberg is 30 *now*. So if you start your startup with people you go to college with and drop out of college to launch it, you could sell it for a fair amount of money by 23. I'm not sure that happens to one person in 1000, but i don't think it strains credibility either. To pivot off your point more directly: maybe you need experience from startups to have a successful startup, but what if you're a young hotshot pairing up with older hotshots and taking advantage of their prior experiences, so you collectively don't make too many mistakes the first time out?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know, people's most-famous-fellow-alums mostly in fact being in music-sports-or-acting is a good argument for just going with music and not overthinking it. I just thought I might see if any outside-the-box answers emerged.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Hm, good point about Zuckerberg. I maybe want something a little more timeless than "dot-com millionaire" though, that feels very time-period-specific, although it is in fact the time period I'm setting this in (high school class of 1999, ideally).

[tanyareed.livejournal.com]

Hmmnn...To my knowledge, the most successful person from my graduating class is Alain Muise who is the Chief Administration Officer for the Municipality of Argyle. This is not a big surprise as when we had mock Parliament, Alain was voted the Prime Minister.

(We're 40 now, but I'm pretty sure Alian entered politics right after he finished University.)

[irilyth]

Yeah, I think the tricky thing is that "success" may not always correlate with fame -- the most successful people in the whole world are pretty famous, but the most successful of the 500 people in my high school class is probably just a doctor or lawyer or business executive or something. (If by "successful" you mostly mean "wealthy" here.)

Non-celebrity artists might be an interesting one -- successful photographers / sculptors / composers / authors / whatever are not necessarily either very famous or very wealthy in the grand scheme of things. But someone whose debut novel at the age of 19 sells a billion copies might be the most successful person in my class in some sense, even if they're not all that rich or famous globally.

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

From my original class ('96) I'd have to say Randy Harrison, aka Justin on the US QaF, but I don't know what he's done since that show. (Also I just found out that another classmate just married the mayor of Atlanta... )

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, I myself am from the high school class of 1999, but I do find the question hard to answer because. . . nobody in my high school class is so famous that I'd necessarily know anything about them if I don't specifically look for it. So if you ask me, I'm going to say that the most well-known person I went to high school with is my former academic rival, a physicist/entrepreneur who is successful enough that people write skeptical New Yorker blog posts about him and he's given a TEDx talk, but I don't have any idea if there are other people who are equally successful whom I haven't kept tabs on because they were never my academic rival. At any rate, I don't think this would work for early 20s, either - even if this guy got his PhD only four years after graduating college.

No one in my own high school class (or even anyone I remember having gone to school with) is on the Wkipedia list of notable alumni for my high school, but Nikki Blonsky, who wasn't quite an alumna of my high school but was associated with it, and Sarah Hughes, who went to the other high school in town and whose sister briefly took dance lessons with my mother, both became famous before they were even 20. Of course, Nikki is famous for music and acting and Sarah is famous for sports. . . .

[ursula]

What about activist-y things? I could see someone running a successful political campaign or a trendy nonprofit at a fairly young age.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

The only one I actually know was a friend who was a year younger than me and has done a whole bunch of mainstream acting. (We're long since out of touch.) http://karlamosley.com/about.html

I didn't know the two girls a few years younger listed in the Wikipedia page who are also actresses.

My high school also had a very strong theater and art department and was not far from New York City so that changes the dynamic slightly.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

Let's try actually answering your question. Not sure if my first non answer posted.

Candidate 1- Susan Day actress from the partridge family who got the part she's most famous for at age 17.

Candidate 2- Ari Fleischer Press Secretary to GWB (2001-2003). Graduated in 1978.

So I'd say unless you're looking for that elusive stardom, 20s is probably a stretch, yes.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

No one from my high school class has done anything on that level, but there were only 26 of us.

Would writer be too meta/seem like a self-insert even though it isn't? Because "wrote a novel and it was an unexpected hit" is a decent narrative. Journalism, maybe? Or blogosphere-sort-of-journalism, although again it could feel too time-specific. Celebrity chef? 20s is super-duper young for that but it feels more plausible in that you can do it w/o schooling, but it takes networking and that takes time.

Oh, hang on, there was one girl in my class who was originally planning to go into professional ballet on high-school graduation, but she blew her knees out senior year and had to quit. Ballet would definitely fit the timeframe.

Also, does it need to be a wide-recognition thing? Local heroics -- firefighter/EMT/something with local-news recognition.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

Such as Alex Morse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_B._Morse), elected mayor of Holyoke, Mass (pop. 40,000), at age 22 in 2011.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I don't just mean wealthy, but they do have to be "financially okay" as opposed to "financially struggling". So no starving artists.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I think "famous enough to be aware of if you keep tabs on them" is sufficient for my purposes. "Could have appeared in a magazine article" or "would turn up results other than a personal homepage in a web search around 2004" or something.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Celebrity chef!!! I... need to think about that. That is *really* interesting though from a character perspective.

I have a personal dislike of writers appearing in stories. I mean, not universally, I loved Fangirl, but mostly I find writers writing about Writing and Being Writers way too navel-gazy to interest me. As it turns out, we are never in this person's head at all in my story and will never know what their career means to them, it just needs to signal prestige/"having one's life together"/"being going places" that sort of thing.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not arguing that this guy is not well-known - just that it's hard for me to know if he is self-evidently the most well-known ;-)

Actually. . . I guess this leads me to think that someone could be quite successful in the world of academics in their early twenties, enough to be profiled in magazines, although I don't know if this kind of success is really indicative of a lasting contribution to the world. But my high school classmate, for instance, could easily have been profiled in magazines at around the age of 21 just because he won major computer science and science competitions in high school and then went on to be the last person ever to be allowed to get a triple major at MIT. As my infamous teenage math prodigy cousin abangaku recently pointed out to me, he appeared in a magazine profile at the age of 17 (do a search for "pamphlet"); he isn't the one who is actually being profiled, but the person who is got profiled for being the first female ever to represent the US in the International Mathematical Olympiad and has evidently gone on to break other gender barriers in mathematics since - she is apparently significant enough to have a Wikipedia page, and almost everything on that page comes from before she was 25.

The same could be true of the academic competitive world of debating that I'm now involved in in a mentorship role. I could easily imagine someone becoming profilable through their debate success. In fact, now that I think of it, I remember reading this article earlier this year, discussing the first African -American women to win a national college debate tournament.

Of course, I guess a lot of what makes competitive academic success profilable is this element of "the first X," so it's possible that if your character is a straight white able-bodied cis male none of this would work for him. But not necessarily - I mean, I genuinely do believe that my high school classmate could have been profiled for these things despite the fact that he's a white guy.

[crystalpyramid]

Wikipedia doesn't think my high school has notable alumni. An awful lot of us are teachers or people who work at banks. One girl moved to Israel and does something for a nonprofit there. Some of us have Ph.D.s. Being tiny is probably part of it; not being the kind of school that super-ambitious people go to, because we're too warm and fuzzy may be another part.

My friend Erica was/is a plus-size model, I think beginning during/after college, but her online resume only goes back to 2008, which is probably 4 years after college. I wonder if that counts? I think that's only regional-level fame, but I like looking at her pictures so link: http://www.modelmayhem.com/129947.

And Jeremy is a professional poker player, but he's less famous than ccommack so it doesn't count.

(This comment is completely unhelpful for your actual purposes.)

[sofer.livejournal.com]

Huh. The only famous person I could think of from my high school is a writer. His first best seller came out when he was 25, which is relatively young. I think it would be very unusual to publish a widely known book before finishing college.

Wikipedia lists Paul Shapiro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Shapiro_(activist)) as the only famous alum from my school. He founded Compassion Over Killing when he was still in high school. I'm not sure how famous the group is, though. He would have been one class behind me, but I have no memory of him.

[glynhogen.livejournal.com]

My high school lacks not only the notable alumni section, but the page itself (though it does warrant a redirect). But add me to the group of people answering the question you didn't ask, and I'd say for early 20s success from the class of 1999, you're looking for quick-turn-around celebrity: somebody who won a thing, or did a project. Arts/athletics/tech are plausible because a) we've seen it in real life, b) it's possible to lay the groundwork for success during the teenage years (embracing, avoiding, or subverting the stereotypes of class jock/nerd/etc. as desired), c) it can be catalyzed by serendipity but does not rely upon it to an excessive degree (angel investor X funded a project, casting director Y happened to overhear an audition for a commercial and ended up offering a part in a TV series) and, related, d) it does not depend upon an extensive network of personal or family contacts (angel investor X and casting director Y were going to work with somebody; the opportunity wasn't manufactured for your character's benefit). If you make them more obscure, then the search has to be a bit more deliberate (which might be fine, depending on the relationship between the characters and the reason for the curiosity) unless they're in similar fields.

[cereph.livejournal.com]

Here is some non helpful information: As far as my graduating class goes, nothing notable. Wikipedia tells me that our 3 notable alumni are a 2 time Olympic gold medalist, a professional football player, and a guy who graduated in 1984, became a morning tv news anchor in 1989, and eventually was "the first male Asian American broadcast journalist to be a primary news anchor of a television station in the United States" but that looks to be about 10-15 years after he graduated.

For early 20's, other than sports/acting/music, what comes to mind is someone who came up with a product/website/etc that happened to take off.