As self-developers, you and I are potential world changers. And as potential world changers it’s our job to keep our minds alive and buzzing with motivational stimuli.

And what better source of motivational stimuli than the success stories of some young successful people who have already achieved their life mission… before they’ve even had a chance to buy their first car!

Four Young Successful People: Believing in Head Starts…

Today I’d like to share with you four success stories that changed my perspective on the creative world.

For me, these people’s achievements alone are enough to motivate anyone to keep at their life mission. But the fact that they were all so young when they achieved what they did, should only motivate us further to think, ‘well, what excuse I have then?’

Elizabeth Taylor

We have all heard of Elizabeth Taylor. Over the years that followed her big break, she became one of the most prominent, respected and successful pretty faces of Hollywood; well known for her legendary charms, looks and acting skills.

But I bet you didn’t know that Elizabeth Taylor was just twelve years of age when she made her big break as was a ‘National Velvet’s leading child star. Whilst her friends were at home playing with dolls, dreaming of being on the big screen. Elizabeth was there. And she was sowing the seeds for her success, for her dream to come true.

Auditioning for this role, must have been frightening for both Elizabeth and her family. But what we can learn from Miss Taylor is that you have to take opportunities if you want to get far in life. And this is where Elizabeth Taylor’s story, can be applied to you.

The truth is that you will never truly believe that you are ready to take a chance. I, for example, am always saying ‘another year and the book will be ready’. But the truth is that you are ready to take the leap of faith because sometimes that chance to take a leap of faith will only come around once in life.

Whether you’re ten or a hundred and ten, the only thing stopping you from giving your everything to the world is you. If you can do the job, and you can do it well, then age, culture, wealth is all just a statistic for your autobiography. And if that leap, falls flat, then you have a much longer time to recover and learn from the experience than if you’d waited around for the next big audition/publishing opportunity.

Anne Frank

When Anne Frank, was thirteen years old there wasn’t much of a chance for the young girl to take opportunities like Elizabeth Taylor did. Being Jewish, her family were forced into exile to escape the Nazi regime. And every day, Anne’s life was at risk.

But Anne Frank never gave up on her dream to become a writer. She clung to the reason she started writing in the first place and began to document her life as a Jewish girl during the Second World War in a journal called Kitty. A book that is now still studied in English and History classes, years later.

Initially Anne Frank wrote the journal for her eyes only, an escape from the torments around her, but in 1944 there was a radio broadcast. And this radio broadcast was asking Dutch sufferers for accounts of their lives. She could have spent her final days in fear. But instead she spent them editing, writing, rewriting. It became Anne’s life purpose to dedicate her to retelling people outside of the regime stories of the struggles she, and many other innocent Jewish people like her, faced at this time.

Unfortunately, she was never alive to see the successful state of her journal. But what we can learn from Anne is that we are never too young to make a stand and break the rules if we see something we don’t like, and that success isn’t about awards or fame or money. But about achieving your dream.

We are never in too poor a situation to work towards a greater cause. Chances are you have a lot more freedom and opportunity to do so that Anne Frank did. So if Anne can write in hiding, fearing for her life, then what’s stopping you?

Robert Nay

Robert Nay isn’t a name that is frequently spoken about in the lives of everyday people. Being honest, I hadn’t heard of him until researching for this post. But I’m sure, you’ve all heard of ‘Bubble Ball’?

In case you haven’t, Bubble ball is 72-level physics puzzle game app that involves the user determining the pathway of a ball around a screen to the finish-line flag. The app surpassed Angry Bird on iTunes rankings, recently, and is now available on both Apple and Android devices. And the man behind the app? Well, he wasn’t a man at all.

Robert Nay, was aged just fourteen when he made Bubble ball and has been described as the one to watch by leading Entrepreneurs across the world. But before Bubble Ball he was just an ordinary boy with an interest in computers.

What we can learn from Robert Nay, is a lesson that we can learn from any successful Entrepreneur. And that’s that, to be successful you have to move with the times and more importantly, make the most of your generation.

Nay was born into a technology-based society. As I was. As Joe was. And this generation, has a life that revolves around things like apps and gaming and processes that speed up or improve daily life. But what separated Nay from his classmates was the fact he didn’t get consumed by what his generation had to offer him, he took advantage of it. And in a way, this is what separates all dreamers from successful people.

Alia Sabur

At eight months of age, Alia Sabur could speak and read with an alien fluency. At fourteen she had graduated from high school. By the time she was eighteen, Alia Sabur had worked her way up to the title of ‘the world’s youngest professor’. She is now working as a prominent scientist in the U.K.

You may not be interested in the world of science, (neither am I, don’t worry about it) but to be the youngest in any field is an achievement in itself… because it means, quite frankly, that you’re the best. You’re at the top. You worked the hardest. You were the most talented. Your idea was the best.

Sabur is someone you could argue was born great. She had always shown early signs of intelligence and tested “off the IQ scale” in years as young as first grade. But nobody is born achieving. Talents are skills and just because you are born with a talent or ability doesn’t mean you should just accept that you’re talented or that you don’t have to work as hard as untalented people around you. Because they will catch up. What makes Sabur different from other intelligent people is that she used what she had, worked just as hard as her classmates and as a result got much further than any of them too.

You might be reading this thinking, well, my youth is up. But what I’m trying to say here isn’t that you have to be the biggest and the best before your twenty five. Some people don’t make their mark on the world until their retired; it’s why you have eighty years to live instead of twenty. What I’m trying to say is that a head start is start. And a start is something all these people had to make.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses: What We Can Learn from these Young & Successful Stories…

As people looking to live outside the support of a safe career, family home and regular pay check it’s more than logical to take a good look at people who succeeded in the face of situations that would make the rest of us give up.

But if you want to succeed you can’t stop there. We have to learn from these young successful people. And what you can learn from these people is that that excuses don’t exist in the world of creators. Lack of inspiration. Gender. Time. Age. These are all hurdles to face when paving the way for your success. But they aren’t valid excuses.

So I’d like you to walk away from this thinking about what separates the dreaming teenager from the teenager that becomes the youngest, the best or the smartest in their field. And I want you to think about how you can leap over whatever separates you from becoming the best that you can be. And I want you to take the leap of faith over that separation, today.

Creating is what you’re born to do. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion, an obsession. We create because we feel we must create. We create because we must share what we know and bring colour or new knowledge to a life outside our own.

There will always be something in your way. That’s why success is a journey and that’s why nobody’s success is paved the same way.

Wrote by Aimee Hall