Self-Made Millionaires’ Stories That’ll Change You Forever

If you need inspiration and motivation to change the way you work and increase productivity, millionaire entrepreneurs with amazing rags to riches stories can help you. These stories aren’t of super-intelligent humans or lucky ones but of superlative grit, determination and insatiable hunger to achieve the unachievable.

Here are 10 stories of self-made millionaires and billionaires that will undoubtedly motivate you to work harder and smarter.

Steve Jobs was the son of poor immigrants

Steve Jobs is hailed as one of the greatest entrepreneurs and designers in history. Jobs was taken in by Paul and Clara Jobs as his birth parents struggled to provide for him. Jobs is known as one of the many college dropouts who made it big but, in reality, he was forced to quit after his first semester as his education was costing his foster parents more money than they could afford.

A short while after dropping out, Jobs created the first Apple machine with the help of co-founder Steve Wozniak. He was then a technician at the video game manufacturing company Atari, but his life changed when Intel agreed to fund his new venture. Jobs became a millionaire by the early age of 23 and his income multiplied by a hundred times by the age of 25.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

He was worth around $10 billion at the time of his death in 2011, although most of it came from his stock in Disney.

Zhou Qunfei lost her mother at age 5 and raised animals for sustenance

Zhou Qunfei, the founder of Lens Technology, was born the youngest of three children in a poor family and was the only one out of her siblings to attend secondary school. Although she was a bright student, she dropped out at age 16 and moved in with her uncle to become a migrant worker.

Her father, a former soldier, became partially blinded and lost a finger in an industrial accident before her birth. He single-handedly raised the family and made a living by making bamboo baskets, chairs, and by repairing bicycles.

My father had lost his eyesight, so if we placed something somewhere, it had to be in the right spot, exactly, or something could go wrong. That’s the attention to detail I demand at the workplace.

When the factory she worked at shut down, Qunfei established her own company at the age of 22. The company began with her siblings and their spouses, and two cousins all working out of a 3-bedroom apartment. The company, Lens Technology, now caters to clients like Tesla, Microsoft, LG and Nokia.

Her current net worth is $11.5 billion and she is known as one of the world’s richest self-made women.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s father was a poor truck driver

Having grown up in the New York City housing projects as the son of a poor truck driver, Howard Schultz never dreamed of going into business. Schultz pursued a different path than his parents — he played football and won an athletic scholarship which allowed him to become the first college graduate in his family.

Although Starbucks is widely known across the world now, it was just a little coffee shop that Schultz stumbled across and took a liking to. He worked hard to become their director of marketing, then quit when he disagreed with the owners on how the store should be run. He then successfully started his own chain of coffee shops and eventually bought and expanded Starbucks.

Although he was not trained or experienced in the gourmet coffee world, Schultz made it due to his sheer strength and perseverance. The company is now valued at $77 billion while Howard’s net worth is estimated to be around $4 billion.

Allyson Byrd dropped out of high school and lived on food stamps

From a high school dropout working at McDonald’s and sustaining herself on food stamps to becoming a “profit accelerator” who helps clients win contracts with Fortune 100 companies, Allyson Byrd has come a long way. At 19, Byrd quit her job at McDonald’s to move in with her cousin. She then went back to finish high school and got a scholarship to college. 

Recognize that choosing greatness will often put you in conflict with blind followers committed to being average.

Byrd is now the CEO of Money Movers International and is a popular speaker and best-selling author. She teaches other entrepreneurs how to skyrocket their company’s profits and has helped generate more than $13 million in revenue in the year 2018 alone.

Leonardo DiCaprio faced poverty and violence at a young age

Leonardo DiCaprio is known for his great acting and box office hits like The Wolf of Wall Street and Titanic. But his humble beginnings were not as glamorous. DiCaprio was born into a poor family and experienced his parents getting divorced at a very young age. The actor hails from a drug-torn town from the outskirts of Los Angeles, and before he rose to fame in Hollywood he faced a lot of poverty, violence and drug-use around him.

Even after auditioning for around 100 times, DiCaprio remained jobless for a year and a half after his venture into acting. This hardship combined with the difficulty he faced in finding an agent made him decide to quit acting. But his need to support his mother financially and his father’s encouragement made him persevere and resulted in the wonderful Oscar-winning actor we now know and adore.

His hard work surely paid off, as DiCaprio’s net worth as of 2020 is estimated to be a whopping $260 million dollars.

Oprah Winfrey was born into a poor family and could barely afford college

Oprah Winfrey is the very definition of self-made. She is not just a millionaire, but the first black woman billionaire with one of the most successful talk shows in history.

Winfrey was born into a poor family and faced abuse and molestation from two of her own family members. She ran away from home at the young age of 13 and dealt with the death of her prematurely born son at 14. But her trauma did not stop her. Instead, she turned it into fuel and at 19 years old became the first African-American correspondent in the state.

I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you enjoyed the process.

A passionate entrepreneur, Winfrey was also awarded a scholarship to Tennessee State University, but she dropped out of the degree when she was offered a job as the youngest and first black, female news anchor at Nashville’s WLAC-TV. In 1986 she started The Oprah Winfrey Show which became wildly popular and ran for 25 long years.

Oprah’s current net worth is a staggering $3.5 billion dollars, making her one of the richest black women in the world.

Arnold Schwarzenegger experienced hunger riots in a war-torn country

This legendary bodybuilder, beloved Terminator actor, and former Governor of California didn’t always live in comfort. Arnold was born and raised in post-World War II Austria and lived in a building with no plumbing, shower or other basic amenities. Growing up in a poor and strict household during the Cold War, he suffered abuse from his father at home and from teachers at school who used physical force as a way to discipline young boys.

After years of working out at the gym (even in the freezing cold) despite his father’s dislike of bodybuilding, twenty-year-old Arnold became the youngest person ever to place first in the Mr. Universe competition. But he was not satisfied with that one title and aimed to reach higher places, namely Hollywood.

Arnold arrived in the United States with less than twenty dollars, but today he is worth around $400 million. His story is inspiring to many and proves that the American Dream is not impossible to achieve — one just needs the vision and willpower to make it work.

Barbara Corcoran struggled with school and dyslexia

Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran is the second of ten children in her family which put a lot of pressure on her. Her dyslexia hindered her and she flunked several courses and had to switch high schools. After college, she worked various jobs but eventually co-founded a company with her boyfriend as she wanted to be her own boss. 7 years later her boyfriend left her to marry her secretary, at which point she formed her own firm.

“You’ll never succeed without me.”
The best (and worst) advice I ever received came in the form of an insult from my long-term boyfriend and business partner. He dumped me for my secretary, and said this to me as he was leaving. I knew I would rather die than let him see me fail! His sage advice made me more determined to become a big success, and I worked harder than ever to prove him wrong. An insult is advice in reverse — and almost always proves to be the best advice you’ll ever hear. 

As of 2020, Barbara’s net worth is estimated to be roughly $80 million.

Warren Buffet’s father was unemployed during the Great Depression

Warren Buffett’s father failed to get hired at the family grocery store so the family of four ran up a tab of grocery bills at the store to be able to have food on the table. Despite that, his mother sometimes skipped meals. As a teen, Warren worked odd jobs such as washing cars and delivering newspapers.

The family gradually achieved financial security when his father started a stock brokerage and eventually went on to become a four-term congressman. Warren started showing an aptitude for numbers and would spend his days watching what investors were doing. After graduation, he started working as an investment salesman and later directly invested in businesses himself. Warren became a millionaire by the age of 30.

The best investment you can make is in your own abilities. Anything you can do to develop your own abilities or business is likely to be more productive.

In 2019 it was reported that Buffett makes up to $37 million a day. His net worth as of 2020 is $69 billion.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai came from a middle-class family in Chennai

Sundar Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu and grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the city of Chennai, India. Pichai and his younger brother would sleep in the living room of the family’s two-room apartment.

At an early age, Pichai displayed a knack for numbers and a remarkable memory that allowed him to remember every number he’d ever dialed into his house phone. Computers became the outlet for his impressive gift.

Pichai graduated from Stanford with a scholarship and went on to do an MBA. He joined Google in 2004, where he led and oversaw the development of products such as Google Chrome, Google Drive, Gmail and Google Maps, always expanding his knowledge. The rest, as they say, is history.