“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?

On January 29, 1954, the woman that would make a meteoric rise to become not only the richest female in America, but also the first ever African-American billionaire was born.

“What I know for sure is that if you want to have success, you can’t make success your goal,” says Oprah Winfrey. “The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant – and the success will naturally follow.”

Today, Harpo has 263 full-time employees, modest turnover (10% to 15% a year) and earns $275 million in revenues. It is a media powerhouse that competes with giants like Lifetime and AOL Time Warner. And, Oprah remains as committed as ever: “I believe I’m just getting started.”

Oprah’s success has not come easily, but rather as the result of a number of crucial factors:

“I always knew I’d be a millionaire by age thirty-two. In fact, I am going to be the richest black woman in America. The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work. If you believe you can only go so far, it is an obstacle.

Be quiet. Part of your responsibility is to honour the quiet inside yourself so you can hear the call. Take five minutes to centre yourself in the morning…set your intention every day…if you don’t have five minutes, you don’t deserve to have the life of your dreams. Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for. Always continue the climb. Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a different way to stand. You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.

Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus. You are built not to shrink down to less but to blossom into more. The right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it.

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you. I said I knew how to edit when I didn’t. I said I knew how to report on stories. When I went to my first city council meeting, I wasn’t quite sure of what to do, but I told the news director that I did.

It’s not just about being able to write a check. It’s being able to touch somebody’s life. Making other people happy is what brings me happiness. I have a blessed life, and I have always shared my life’s gifts with others. I will continue to use my voice and my life as a catalyst for encouraging people to help make a difference in the lives of others.

What I know is, is that if you do work that you love, and work that fulfills you, the rest will come. And, I truly believe, that the reason I’ve been able to be so financially successful is because my focus has never, ever for one minute been money.

You can be pursuing a profession because your parents say it’s the best thing. You can be pursuing a profession because you think you will make a lot of money. You can be pursuing a profession because you think you are going to get a lot of attention. None of that will do you any good if you are not being honest with yourself.

You become what you believe. You are where you are today in your life based on everything you have believed. I don’t believe in coincidences.

I don’t care about being bigger, because I’m already bigger than I ever expected to be. My constant focus is on being better. Should I be doing multimedia video production? Or seminars on the Internet? How can I do what I’m already doing in a more forceful way?”

He has been called the Warren Buffett of Latin America, but on the most recent Forbes list of the world’s richest people, the Mexican born Carlos Slim Helu bumped the great American investor down to third spot.

With an estimated net worth of $67.8 billion, Helu is the richest person in the world. He is known for never cracking a smile, but Helu’s current monopoly over the telecommunications industry in Mexico must surely make him one happy businessman.

With his hands now in all of the retail, banking and insurance, technology, and auto parts manufacturing industries, Helu shows no signs of slowing down.

There is no one in the world quite like Carlos Slim Helu. Until his recent jump to the top spot on the Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest, he was something of a mystery to the business world.

He worked in relative isolation, with no computers in the basement of his drab two-storey office building. But, his seclusion should not be mistaken for a weakness. Indeed, his power is so great, that when he did suffer a weakness in the form of heart surgery a few years back, his companies’ shares actually began to tremble.

So, just how did this son of Lebanese immigrants become one of the wealthiest people in the world, and a household name across an entire continent?

“When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.

Technology is going to transform people’s lives and society everywhere in the world. I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what’s going on and try to see where we can fit in.

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. We think that there will be an ‘entrepreneurial reconversion’ of many companies that have lived in the industrial era and now are becoming part of this new [digital] civilization.

It’s not a question of arriving [at a new company] and putting in a whole new administration but instead, arriving and ‘compacting’ things as much as possible, reducing management layers.

We want as few management layers as possible, so that executives are very close to the operations. We also don’t believe in having big corporate infrastructures.

I’ve always said that the better off you are, the more responsibility you have for helping others. Just as I think it’s important to run companies well, with a close eye to the bottom line, I think you have to use your entrepreneurial experience to make corporate philanthropy effective.

When there is a crisis, that’s when some are interested in getting out and that’s when we are interested in getting in.“

As self-described “accidental entrepreneurs,” Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore created what would become by far the foremost semiconductor maker in the world. They didn’t set out to create a billion dollar company or to transform an industry, but that is exactly what the pair did when they founded Intel in 1968.

Though best known for its Pentium and Celeron microprocessors that can be found in more than three-quarters of the new PCs that come today, Intel also makes flash memories and embedded semiconductors. Now, with over $35 billion in revenue and annual growth standing at 13.5 percent, the legacy left by Noyce and Moore remains one of the strongest examples of innovation and entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

Today, Intel is ranked 49th on Fortune 500’s list of the top revenue grossing companies. Noyce and Moore may no longer be in charge of the daily running of the business they first founded in 1968; however, their impact on not only the company, but also the entire industry can still be felt.

The maker of motherboard chipsets, network cards, flash memory drives, graphic chips, embedded processors and more, Intel is an innovator and a leader in the world of electronics and computing. How did two scientists who knew nothing about business become two of the most successful examples of entrepreneurship in history?

There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepreneur, for whom the entrepreneurial urge drives everything, and who can make a business out of almost anything. But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it. Then the entrepreneurial spirit eventually catches on.

To me the opportunities to start a company are few and far between. I’m not the sort of entrepreneur who can just say, ‘I’m going to start a company. Let’s look for an opportunity.

I had no training in business after my sophomore year of college. I didn’t take any courses outside of chemistry, math, and physics. Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error. I think a lot of this really could have been learned more efficiently.

We saw semiconductor memory as an opportunity to make something complex and sell it for all kinds of digital applications. So that was the first thing we went after. That was really the basis of our business plan.

Fortunately, very much by luck, we had hit on a technology that had just the right degree of difficulty for a successful startup. This was how Intel began.

Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel ought to build a computer for the home. And I asked him, ‘What the heck would anyone want a computer for in his home?’ It seemed ridiculous!

“We had no idea at all that we had turned the first stone on something that was going to be an $80 billion business.

In retrospect, there are a lot of things we could have done better along the way. But, we did enough right to grow a fairly large company.

It’s important to remember one thing that is essential for any entrepreneurial organization. Do what you do well. Look at other things as incremental opportunities, but don’t change the basis of what you do well.”

He took a small-town newspaper and turned it into a billion dollar operation, gaining control of the information flow to nearly half the world in the process. He is loved by some, hated by many and even feared, but the power that Rupert Murdoch has in this world is undeniable. By thinking beyond national boundaries and embracing the opportunities presented in new technologies, Murdoch has created the first truly global media empire.

Murdoch’s success was never a sure thing. He was considered a lazy alcoholic with a penchant for nothing but partying. How did he turn his reputation around and become one of the most well known, albeit controversial media moguls in the world today?

“For better or for worse, our company (The News Corporation Ltd.) is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values. News… communicating news and ideas, I guess.. is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read and alternative television channels.

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

I’m a catalyst for change … You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place. The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. 

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard. You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.

We have no intention of failing. The only question is how great a success we’ll have. You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own. The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.”