In his youth, Tom Watson was anything but the picture of success he would later come to be. He was asthmatic, shy and had few friends.

But, this loner would soon become one of the greatest and richest salesmen in the world.

As one of the most successful self-made industrialists of his time, Watson would turn the winds of fate, transforming his humble beginnings into a career whose legacy continues to this day.

When Watson decided to change the name of his company to International Business Machines, he knew that it was a big name for a small company.

But, over the next few decades, Watson would build the company to live up to its name.

From a traveling door-to-door salesman to CEO of one of the largest expanding companies in the U.S., Watson’s name has since become synonymous with not only the beginnings of the computer industry but with what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur.

How did he do it?

“It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. It is better to aim at perfection and miss it than to aim at imperfection and hit it. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far side.

Plan for the future…Have faith in the future. Resolve to stand for something big and fine outside of your business life.

Solve it. Solve it quickly, solve it right or wrong. If you solve it wrong, it will come back and slap you in the face, and then you can solve it right.

Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity. Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Every time we’ve moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

Too many people are waiting for someone else to give them a push. We have tried to develop self-starters in IBM.
All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

You must guard constantly against those who lack vision. You must guard against the reactionary mind. Always cultivate and associate with persons of vision and with persons who believe that things are going to be better. When you do this, you take on the kind of vision, backed by the right kind of inspiration that you need if you are going to grow in this business or any other business.

It is impossible for any man, I don’t care how able he may be, to do the work and attend to all the details of a business – to accomplish anything – without the support of his entire organization. This business is such that neither I nor any executive staff can run it alone. It is too big. Our company has grown each year and succeeded because everybody has been contributing to its success.

Your success will be determined by the manner in which you use the tools you have been given to work with. When practicing the art of selling use all your talents. Put everything you have into your efforts; above all put your personality into them. Never copy anybody. Be yourself.”

“I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job,” recalls Pierre Omidyar. An unexpected success, that side hobby has today become the world’s largest personal online trading community.

The website hosts nearly four million auctions every day, with almost half a million new items being added for sale every 24 hours. Omidyar’s personal net worth is estimated to be roughly $10 billion.

“When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, ‘Boy, that must have been really hard,’…that was probably hard,” says Omidyar.

“And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you’re never going to know which is which until you actually go out and do it.”

Whether Omidyar’s accomplishments look easy or not, they are undoubtedly significant, having not only revolutionized the way people do business, but making a multi-billion dollar fortune along the way.

How did he do it?

“I was just pursuing what I enjoyed doing. I mean, I was pursuing my passion. It is not really work if you are having fun…that was the case with me. I always wanted to be involved with computers. Like most software people, it is very much passion more than anything else. The ability to create software that could have a benefit or an impact on people that used it was what was driving me.

You’ll fail at some things – that’s a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience. What you learn from those challenges and those failures are what will get you past the next ones…I was the pretty consistent bull and the cheerleader on eBay actually.

Whatever future you’re building, don’t try to program everything. Five Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union – in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won’t work any better for any of us.

By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth – it could achieve a certain degree of self-organization. Build a platform – prepare for the unexpected…you’ll know you’re successful when the platform you’ve built serves you in unexpected ways. To truly prepare for the unexpected, you’ve got to position yourself to keep a couple of options open so when the door of opportunity opens, you’re close enough to squeeze through. 

We believe people are basically good; we believe everyone has something to contribute; we believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people; we recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual; we encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated. I founded the company on the notion that people were basically good and that if you give them the benefit of the doubt you’re rarely disappointed.

So the only thing you can do is have a certain set of values that you encourage people to adopt and the only way your customers are going to adopt those values is if they see that you’re living those values as well. It’s all about treating each other the way you want to be treated yourself so that you can do business with one another.

We have to do it internally at eBay at the company as well, because if we don’t then eventually that seeps through, and customers will see that and that will harm our business. So our business is based on that. Nice guys, a responsible company that has its heart in the right place – that’s run by real human beings – it has to be successful, because if we weren’t that way, eBay would not be successful. eBay wouldn’t exist. It would not be possible. 

You should pursue your passion. If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful. You have to really believe in what you’re doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you’ll be successful.“

Donald Trump ranked #4 on our list of The Top 21 Celebrity Entrepreneurs.

“Get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out,” Trump once said. Indeed, this has been his motto from his earliest days assisting his father’s real estate business to his multi-million dollar deals in the high stakes world of Manhattan real estate.

He has earned a reputation as a ruthless, cunning and suave businessman who can spot a business opportunity a mile away. He has turned the deal-making process into an art form and he has demonstrated that he can come back swinging after even the hardest of challenges to wind up again on top.

Estimated to be worth over $2 billion, Trump has secured his name as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

“What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate,” says Trump. He has reacted to the twists and turns in his life with optimism, becoming CEO of the largest privately held company in New York, with over 22,000 employees and estimated revenues in excess of $10 billion. What did he use to get ahead?

“I learned a lot about discipline and about channeling my aggression into achievement. I decided that as long as I had to be in college, I might as well test myself against the best. Always look out for yourself.

I was relentless, even in the face of total lack of encouragement, because much more often than you’d think, sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure. When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough, Just go get them.

My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want. You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.

My experience is that if you’re fighting for something you believe in – even if it means alienating some people along the way – things usually work out for the best in the end. The most important thing in life is to love what you’re dong, because that’s the only way you’ll ever be really good at it. Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. Without passion, you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.

If you go for a home run on every pitch, you’re also going to strike out a lot. I try never to leave myself too exposed, even if it means sometimes settling for a triple, a double, or even, on rare occasions, a single.

If you want to sell a car and you spend five dollars to wash and polish it and then apply a little extra elbow grease, suddenly you find you can charge an extra four hundred dollars, and get it. If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much.

When I build something for somebody, I always add $50 million or $60 million onto the price. My guys come in, they say it’s going to cost $75 million. I say it’s going to cost $125 million, and I build it for $100 million. Basically, I did a lousy job. But they think I did a great job.

Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. I’m a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision. I ask I ask I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that’s when I make a decision. I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms.

Somewhere out there are a few men with more innate talent at golf than Jack Nicklaus, or women with greater ability at tennis than Chris Evert or Martina Navratilova, but they will never lift a club or swing a racket and therefore will never find out how great they could have been. Instead, they’ll be content to sit and watch stars perform on television.

Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. I like thinking big. I always have. If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.”

Home mortgages, auto loans, installment credit – they may be taken for granted today, but before this son of Italian immigrants came along, such things didn’t exist. Amadeo Peter Giannini – A.P. to his friends – revolutionized the banking world by focusing on “the little people.” Giannini passed away in 1949 at the age of 79. By that time, the bank he had founded, the Bank of America, had become the largest bank in the world, with $7 billion in assets and more than 525 branches in over 300 American cities. Today, Giannini stands out as one of TIME Magazine’s Builders and Titans of the 20th century – the only banker to make this list of the century’s most 100 important people.

He never dreamed of being a banker when he was a child, but today, there is nary a student of retail banking who does not know the incredible story of this determined entrepreneur. A son of poor immigrants, Giannini helped build the first national system of banks for the ordinary person, all the while fueling California’s economic development and inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs. What were Giannini’s secrets for success?

Giannini was born in 1870 in San Jose, California, to the son of recent immigrants from Genoa, Italy. His father, Luigi, was a farmer who had grown up in Ligure, a small village that today is home to just 500 people. His mother, Virginia Demartini, married Luigi when she was fourteen years old and he was 29. Together, the two decided to leave Italy and head to America in the hopes of making a fortune. With the little money they had collected from relatives, Giannini’s parents rented a house with a few rooms. After six months of renovations, they had transformed it into a functioning inn with over twenty rooms. It was in that inn that the young Giannini was born.

The family inn continued to grow and eventually became a hotel. Luigi sold it after a few more years and bought a 40-acre plot of land. It seemed that the family was finally living their dreams. That is until one day, when Luigi got into an argument with an employee over a simple one-dollar debt and wound up getting killed. It was a massive blow for the seven year old Giannini, who witnessed the tragic event before his very own eyes. In that instant, his 22 year old mother had become a widow.

Virginia later remarried to Lorenzo Scatena, who was both a farmer and the owner of a small produce grocery business. She convinced her new husband that produce was more profitable than farming, and so the family moved to San Francisco in 1882 in order to be nearer to the port. When Giannini was 14 years old, he left school and went to work full time for his stepfather.

For the next five years, Giannini devoted himself to the store. He took on the job of public relations, writing letters to all their potential clients and suppliers and following up in person. When he was 19 years old, Giannini’s stepfather rewarded his hard work by making him a partner in the thriving business. Giannini now owned half of Lorenzo Scatena & Co. It wasn’t until he reached the age of 31 that Giannini decided to get out of the produce business. He made an announcement that he was “retiring”, but few believed he would be gone for very long. Indeed, the next phase of his life was when his real career would begin.

At the age of 32, after making a handsome profit in produce and having stepped back from the business world, Giannini thought he would have more time to devote to his own interests – reading, traveling and the like. But, fate would have other plans. He quickly began receiving offers from other businesses eager to snap him up, but there was one in particular that caught his attention; the Columbus Savings & Loan Association asked Giannini to join their board of directors.

The Columbus S&L was a modest bank headquartered in the Italian section of North Beach. Giannini decided to accept their offer, in the hopes that the position would allow him to both hold a prestigious title and also to help society. For the next two years, Giannini devoted himself to the bank and things seemed to be progressing smoothly. That is, until he began to encounter difficulties with the association’s other directors.

Giannini wanted to help hardworking immigrants like his parents, but the Columbus S&L had little interest in extending loans to anyone except businessmen and the already wealthy. In other words, you could only get money if you already had some money. This didn’t make sense to Giannini. However, his pleas to lend to the working class fell on deaf ears. And so, in 1904, Giannini raised $150,000 from his stepfather and ten other friends, and opened the Bank of Italy.

The Bank of Italy was located in a converted saloon right across the street from the Columbus S&L; even the saloon’s bartender was kept on in the role of assistant teller. It might not have been the most professional of ventures – he solicited business door to door at a time when doing so was considered unethical – but that didn’t matter. The Bank of Italy allowed Giannini to fulfill his dream of helping the working class. Within one year, deposits to this ‘bank for the little guy’ were exceeding $700,000.

By 1906, deposits to the Bank of Italy had surpassed $1 million. Giannini seemed to be on top of the world when disaster struck. On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was hit by one of the largest earthquakes in the city’s history; much of the city was destroyed. Whereas other banks took as long as one month to reopen, Giannini had reopened the Bank of Italy in just six days. He may have been operating from just a plank stretched across two barrels in the street, but for those who needed loans – and now, more than ever – that he was operating was celebration enough.

Over the next ten years, Giannini would open several other Bank of Italy branches throughout the city. In 1928, he approached the President of the Bank of America, Los Angeles, about a possible merger. When the merger was finalized, Giannini remained chairman of the new institution, but agreed to keep the name Bank of America as it was symbolic of the new bank’s broader mission.

Under Giannini’s leadership, the new Bank of America quickly became one of the only banks to reach beyond a single city. He founded TransAmerica as a holding company for his widening interests, which even included some overseas banks. TransAmerica was also the controlling shareholder of the Bank of America for a period, until the U.S. Congress stepped in to break it up.

He may have gained many opponents on his rise to the top for his use of unconventional tactics and his focus on the working class, but even as his monopoly expanded, it was hard to make the case that his actions were against the public interest. Today, as banks continue to diversify the range of services they provide, they are carrying out the legacy that was left behind by Giannini.

“Most people live and die with their music still unplayed,” Mary Kay Ash once said. “They never dare to try.” Ash was not one of those people. Raised in a time when few women were in business, let alone successful in business, Ash broke down barriers on her rise up to creating a multi-billion dollar operation.

Today, Mary Kay Cosmetics Inc. continues to be a leader in the industry, with outlets in over 30 countries that are staffed by 1.6 million employees.

Ash once said that “people fall forward to success.” In her case, it seems she didn’t fall so much as she ran towards her dreams. With ambition and determination, Ash created not only a successful billion-dollar company but also one of the few to be featured three times in Fortune magazine’s “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America.”

How did Ash break through the glass ceiling of gender discrimination to become a household name around the world?

“Our Company was begun with only one objective, that of giving women the chance to succeed, an opportunity that simply did not exist in the early ’60s.

Many women have made the mistake of changing their beliefs to accommodate their work. It must be the other way around. Those men didn’t believe a woman had brain matter at all. I learned back then that as long as men didn’t believe women could do anything, women were never going to have a chance.

I knew that I had been denied opportunities to fulfill my optimum potentials simply because I was a woman. These feelings were not mere indulgences of self-pity, because I had personally known so many other women who had suffered similar injustices.

You can do it! So often a woman comes to us who desperately needs to hear that. Frequently she is a housewife who has been out of the job market for many years, or who has never worked outside the home. When I see a woman like this, I want to do for her what nobody did for me, in the way of providing opportunities. 

I believe that most successful people are ordinary people with extraordinary determination. You cannot keep determined people from success. If you place stumbling blocks in their way, they will use them for stepping-stones and climb to new heights. Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.

Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm. If you act enthusiastic, you become enthusiastic. A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one. 

You can have anything in this world you want, if you want it badly enough and you’re willing to pay the price. Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve. 

I was taught to put my best effort into anything I did, and I can honestly say I’ve always done that. Still, there were many times when I failed, many times when I was disappointed. We didn’t set the world on fire from the first day: disappointments, setbacks and work have created the Company as it is today. 

Every failure, obstacle or hardship is an opportunity in disguise. Success in many cases is failure turned inside out. For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser…Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.” 

“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way,” says Robert Kiyosaki.

With 18 books under his belt, and 26 million copies sold combined around the world, this millionaire self-help investment guru must have had a very strong dream. Indeed, three of his books have been on the best sellers lists of The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times simultaneously.

From his humble beginnings in Hawaii, Kiyosaki has today become one of the most respected – and controversial – businessmen and motivational speakers in the world.

“I still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii,” says Kiyosaki. He may still be from Hawaii, but Kiyosaki’s impact on the world of personal finance has been anything but little.

Today, as one of the leading authors and motivational speakers in America on strategies of achieving personal financial freedom, Kiyosaki has achieved a cult-like in the millions. Rober Kiyosaki also came in at #18 in our list of the Top The 21 Celebrity Entrepreneurs.

How did this little, fat kid from Hawaii become a big, strong player in the extremely competitive industry?

“We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them. The poor and middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them The rich buy or create assets that work for them so they don’t have to.

You need to understand the difference between an asset and a liability. An asset puts money in your pocket and a liability takes money from your pocket. The rich understand the difference and buy assets, not liabilities.

In the Industrial Age the ticket for success was to go to school, get good grades, and find a safe secure job for life. You did not have to worry about your financial education because the company and the government would take care of you financially once your working days were over. The rules have changed. You can no longer rely on your employer or your government to take care of you.

Today, we are in the Information Age and more than job security we all need financial security. Unfortunately, our school system teaches us little about the subject of money. Our children will be required to learn much more than we ever did, and much more than schools are prepared to teach them. Cash flow management is an essential life skill and a skill that will require more and more sophistication as we move further into the Information Age.

The single best piece of advice I can give is this: Be careful what financial advice you listen to. Most financial advice—such as “save money,” “get out of debt,” “invest for the long term” and “diversify”—is fine for the middle class or the poor. It’s not good advice if you want to be rich because it is obsolete advice. For example, in 1971 the U.S. went off the gold standard and the U.S. dollar became a currency and . . . currencies are designed to lose money. That’s why today, “save money” is bad advice.

Your business revolves around your asset column, as opposed to your income column. The rich focus on their asset columns while the poor and middle class focus on their income columns.

The Tax Code of the United States provides many vehicles for people to save on their taxes. Most of these vehicles are available to anyone but it is the rich who usually look for them and use them because they have learned to “mind their own business.” For example an individual can utilize the tax advantages and protection provided by a corporation to get rich much faster than someone who is an employee or a small-business sole proprietor.

Work to learn–don’t work for money. To become successful you must learn how to manage cash flow, systems and people. Being in the Marines taught me leadership and working in sales for Xerox taught me how to sell and how to accept rejection. All of these skills were important for my success. Look for jobs that can help you develop the skills of managing cash flow, systems and people rather than just pay you well.

Many entrepreneurs fail to grow because they lack leadership skills. And rather than look in the mirror, they find it easier to blame others. Blame is short for be-lame, and you can’t be an effective leader if you’re lame.

Most people never get wealthy simply because they are not trained financially to recognize opportunities right in front of them. The rich have learned to recognize opportunities as well as how to create them.

Remember to dream big, think long-term, underachieve on a daily basis, and take baby steps. That is the key to long-term success. If you aren’t practicing and playing to be first, then maybe you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.“

You may not know him by name, but chances are if you have ever had a sleepless night and turned on the television, Ron Popeil has been there to keep you company.

He is the king of the late night infomercial, and the man who made famous such catch phrases as “But wait, there’s more!” and “It slices! It dices!”

But, Popeil is also more than that. Over the past forty years, Popeil has created for himself an empire.

By inventing and selling over $2 billion worth of products, Popeil has turned his company, Ronco Teleproducts, into a global leader in direct response marketing.

There are some who say that what Popeil has been able to accomplish in his career is nothing short of magic. To create an empire out of seemingly nondescript kitchen wares is without a doubt an impressive feat.

It was not, however, magic. The secrets behind Popeil’s success are as simple to follow as the instructions on his Veg-O-Matic.

“The first time I went there the proverbial light bulb went on in my head. I saw all these people selling products, making sales, pocketing money, and my mind went racing. I can do what they’re doing, I thought, but I think I can do it better than they can.

I talked, I yelled, I hawked, and it worked! I was stuffing money into my pockets, more money than I had ever seen in my life.

Through selling I could escape from poverty and the miserable existence I had with my grandparents. I didn’t have to be poor the rest of my life.

Developing and marketing a product are like left and right feet. They both have to work for the product to succeed.

If you have that passion, it is conveyed through marketing. People see it. I get up before them and show them something new and wonderful. When I create something, I believe in it, and I am very passionate about it.

They throw a lot of stuff against the wall and hope something sticks. The failure rate is dependent solely on what you’re throwing up against the wall.

I’m willing to make a serious investment in an idea and take two to two and one-half years of my life to create it, to get behind it and understand it and take it to the marketplace.

First, I see what is needed in the marketplace. The next thing is I ask what’s out there. What you don’t want to do is come up with a product and then find out that someone is successfully marketing a good product and can take business away.

If you create a product that’s needed in the marketplace, people are going to buy it. It’s so easy for me to sell my products because the market exists.

I have an innate talent. I used to think it was luck, but after one success after another, I realized that I know what is needed in the marketplace. Most people don’t understand the market. Most people have no clue. All they know is ‘I got an idea, and I need a patent.’

Before I went on TV with the Chop-O-Matic, I spent several weeks selling the product at Woolworth’s. After several days of demonstrating the product, I learned what features consumers were particularly interested in.

If I’ve been chopping away for 10 hours a day, giving the same pitch over and over again refining it a little bit each time, why would I ever need a script?

You hear about all these people making all this money on paper. And everybody wants to get rich quickly, but they don’t want to work for it. They want to sit back and leverage everything they’ve got to make the big score. People say, ‘Ron, you’re so lucky.’ Yeah, the harder I work, the luckier I am.“

Calvin Klein knew by the time he was five what he wanted to spend his life doing. He was going to be a fashion designer and no one was going to stop him.

Indeed, Klein would go on to become one of the most respected designers in the fashion industry, with a billion dollar company and a name brand that can be found on almost everything from jeans to perfume to underwear.

Both his unique fashion sense and his marketing genius have earned him the nickname ‘Calvin the Conqueror’ for the impact he has had on the global fashion industry throughout his astonishingly successful 40-year career.

A man of extremes, Klein managed to turn his excitement about fashion and design into a lifelong career that has not only spawned a billion-dollar company, but has also revolutionized the way the world thinks about clothing.

So, how did Klein manage to survive at the top for nearly four decades?

“There has been a change in men’s attitudes toward their clothes. In the past, the wife bought all the husband’s clothes, and that happens a lot less today. American men are more aware of fashion; they’re not afraid of it and they like clothes better and are willing to spend more time and money choosing them.

Fashion is about selling clothes. I’m in a business where no one cares about anything except how well your last collection sold.

Fashion is about change. It’s fun to keep changing and to change the silhouettes, to change the fabrics and to change the colour. The next cKone generation has different values and communicates in a very modern way. When we take this campaign to email, it makes it very personal.

I think fantasies are for the birds. Anything I wanted to do, I did. If there’s something I want, nothing stops me.

Anything we do in advertising is controversial. If it’s provocative and sensual and related to what we’re selling, I’m willing to take the chance. I have fun with the ads.

I create the underwear to make people look sexy. So my point is that when I advertise it, for sure I’m going to show it to its greatest advantage. And, I’m going to do it on somebody who has an excellent body, male or female, doesn’t matter.

I don’t think about my fame very much and I don’t dwell on success. Maybe that’s one reason I’m successful. I get either very excited about something or very depressed.

Doing everything as well as possible meant survival.“

“America doesn’t need another faceless, institutional apparel company,” says American Apparel founder Dov Charney. “They need an apparel company that gets it and does it right.”

When Charney was in prep school, he began bootlegging garbage bags of K-Mart t-shirts from the U.S. back to his native Canada. Today, Charney heads American Apparel, the brand-free, sweatshop-free, made-in-America clothing chain he founded in 1997 that is taking the world by storm. Charney was named Ernst & Young’s 2004 Entrepreneur of the Year and one of Details magazine’s 50 most powerful people under 42. American Apparel is now the largest t-shirt manufacturer in the U.S., but Charney’s mission goes beyond creating cool clothes.

“Give me the chance of going to Harvard or being there when Google started and I want to be there making $3 an hour sweeping their floors. Or Apple when Steve Jobs started it,” says Charney. “Maybe I’m delusional but that’s what I think American Apparel is.” For Charney, the success of American Apparel has just begun. But how did he get to where he is today? How did a Jewish Canadian college dropout become the CEO of one of the most revered and fastest-growing companies in America?

“I think I was just born overcharged…I was such a crazy kid in elementary school I was almost kicked out.

My friends were selling these great bootleg t-shirts in front of the Forum. I was going to prep school in the States at the time and the t-shirts there were a bit different, better for the silk-screening process. So I started buying t-shirts at K-mart and bringing them to Canada in garbage bags on the train.

They took me down to Station 10, which doesn’t exist anymore, and after a couple of hours of me yelling, ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ they let me out and gave me back my cash and my shirts. So what did I do? Headed straight for the Cock ‘n Bull to try and unload the rest of them.

I was barley 18. So that was the beginning and I guess because I lost money I felt compelled to keep hustling.

I called up a guy I trust and asked, ‘Who’s the best out there at organizing a factory?’ He said Marty. So I called him on a Saturday and said, ‘Dude, my name’s Dov and I need help.’ He started Monday; that’s the way I operate.

I started bringing like 5,000, 10,000 t-shirts at a time, on a U-Haul truck in the summer, and I developed a kind of importing business, from the United States to Canada. That’s why it’s called American Apparel.

When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s the first thing. And you have to be resilient, because people are going to try to knock you down. 

It’s sickening money, man. We’re minting money. It’s t-shirts that look good, t-shirts that feel good, and t-shirts that are made in a non-exploitative setting. We designed the rate in such a way that the average person should be able to make $100 a day, that’s our target. We want to pay more than the prevailing wages in Los Angeles, because we want to have the happiest work force we can have. I have the highest-paid apparel workers in the world. 

As a result of this system, we’re able to compete with China and kick ass the American way. It’s less expensive, for me, the way we do business, to manufacture here in the United States. There’s a high cost to going offshore. If you’re working with a supplier in China, you’ve got to work months in advance. If you’re working with your own factory, you can wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, let’s make 10,000 tank tops today.’ 

I think for a designer to be in his underwear when he’s designing underwear is quite common. And I’m in my underwear in my office all the time. I frequently drop my pants to show people my new product. 

Passion. That’s it. When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s it. I want to be remembered as one of the great CEOs of our time and of my generation. And I think that I’m gonna make them proud. That’s my plan.

We plan to continue to behave in a contrarian matter. This creative environment is what got us to this point. We certainly aren’t going to stop doing it now after we created a highly profitable company.“

As a young boy, Satoshi Tajiri was dubbed “Dr. Bug” thanks to his fascination with insects. But when Tajiri discovered a way to combine his interest in insects with his passion for videogames, he had an electronic revolution on his hands.

Today, children the world over remain enthralled with Tajiri’s creation of Pokemon, which has made it the most popular video game franchise in the world, second only to Super Mario.

According to some reports, Tajiri has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a disease that shows itself in the form of social awkwardness and public clumsiness, among other things.

Despite this, he has managed to become one of the most beloved and successful video game designers in history. How did he do it?

“I’m part of the first generation who grew up with manga [comics] and anime [animation], you know, after ‘Godzilla.’ I was absorbed with Ultraman on TV and in manga.

I saw Game Boy when it was first released. The idea for Pokémon clicked in my mind. The basic idea for Pokemon seemed a good fit for Game Boy.

The communication aspect of Game Boy - it was a profound image to me. It has a communication cable. In Tetris, its first game, the cable transmitted information about moving blocks. That cable really got me interested. I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.

The more I learned about games, the more frustrated I became because the games weren’t very good. I could tell a good game from a bad game. My conclusion was: let’s make our own games. 

When you’re a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you’ve never been before. That’s like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that. When I finished Pokemon, I thought Nintendo would reject it. I was like a baseball player sliding into second base knowing he’s going to be out. But somehow, I was safe.

Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one – that’s what Pokemon is.

It’s the way I work. I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I’ve worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It’s better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.“

Where do you find your inspiration?