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Those early years were tough, he told Entrepreneur: “I remember them vividly. It’s far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces. It’s difficult to hold your family life together; it’s bloody hard work and only one word really matters — and that’s surviving.”

最初的几年很艰难，他告诉《企业家》杂志：“我还清楚地记得那些岁月。对我来说，建立一家小型公司开始创业比领导成千上万的员工和 400家公司要困难得多。白手起家创建一家公司意味着一周七天，一天24小时不停地工作，还有离婚，因为你很难兼顾家庭生活。那时工作非常艰苦，只有一个词最重要，那就是生存。”

2

Warren Buffett was working as an investment salesman in Omaha.

沃伦·巴菲特在奥马哈做投资推销员。

In his early 20s, Buffett worked as an investment salesman for Buffett-Falk & Co. in Omaha before moving to New York to be a securities analyst at age 26. During that year, he started Buffett Partnership, Ltd., an investment partnership in Omaha.

在他20出头的时候，巴菲特在奥马哈市的巴菲特-福尔克公司从事投资推销员的工作。之后在纽约成为一名26岁的证券分析师。在同一年中，他还创办了自己的巴菲特合伙公司，这是一家位于奥马哈的投资合伙企业。

New York just wasn’t for him, Buffett told NBC. “In some places it’s easy to lose perspective. But I think it’s very easy to keep perspective in a place like Omaha.”

巴菲特曾对NBC表示，纽约并不适合自己。他说：“在一些地方很容易会让人失去自己的投资观点。但我认为在像奥马哈这样的地方，人们能够很容易保持自己的观点。”

3

Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz was a Xerox salesman.

星巴克执行总裁霍华德·舒尔茨在施乐公司做销售

After graduating from Northern Michigan University, Schultz worked as a salesman for Xerox. His success there led a Swedish company named Hammerplast that made coffeemakers to recruit him at age 26.

在北密歇根大学毕业后，霍华德·舒尔茨在施乐公司做销售。他的业绩很好，瑞典咖啡机制造商Hammerplast雇佣了他，当时他26岁。

While working for that company, he encountered the first Starbucks outlets in Seattle, and went on to join the company at age 29.

在这家公司工作时，他接触到了西雅图第一家星巴克门店，并在29岁时加入星巴克。

On his job in Xerox, Schultz writes in “Pour Your Heart Into It”: “I learned more there than in college about the worlds of work and business. They trained me in sales, marketing, and presentation skills, and I walked out with a healthy sense of self-esteem. Xerox was a blue-chip pedigree company, and I got a lot of respect when I told others who my employer was … But I can’t say I ever developed a passion for word processors.”

舒尔茨在施乐的工作中写道：“在工作和商业领域，我比在大学学到了更多的东西。他们对我进行了销售、营销和展示技巧的培训，我带着一种健康的自尊心走出去。施乐是一家优秀的蓝筹股公司，当我告诉别人我的雇主是谁时，我得到了很多尊重。..但我不能说我曾经对文字处理器产生了热情。”

4

Beyoncé was dropping her second solo album.

碧昂丝放弃了她的第二张个人专辑。

At the age of 25, the Destiny’s Child star had already embarked on a solo career and taken the music world by storm.

在25岁的时候，这位命运之星的童星已经开始了独奏生涯，并掀起了音乐界的风暴。

Beyoncé’s first solo effort came about in 2002, on her future husband Jay-Z’s “’03 Bonnie & Clyde,” Business Insider reported.

碧昂斯的第一次独奏是在2002，关于她未来的丈夫Jay-Z的“03 Bonnie & Clyde”。

The following year, the award-winning singer dropped her first solo album “Dangerously in Love,” and embarked on a tour for the album.

第二年，这位获奖歌手放弃了她的第一张个人专辑”Dangerously in Love”，开始了她的专辑巡演。

When Beyoncé turned 25 in 2006, she released her second solo album “B’Day” to coincide with her big day.

碧昂斯在2006年仅25岁时，她发行了她的第二张个人专辑“B‘Day”，以配合她重要的一天。

5

Tesla and SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk was running his first internet company.

特斯拉和SpaceX公司首席执行官和创建人埃隆·马斯克正经营他的首家互联网公司

Before turning 25, Musk dropped out of his PhD program at Stanford to join the dot-com boom and launch his first internet company, Zip2, which provided business directories and maps, Ashlee Vance reports in “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.”

25岁前，马斯克在斯坦福大学读博期间退学，加入了网络公司创业热潮，开办了他的首家互联网公司Zip2，提供企业名录和地图服务。艾什丽·万斯曾在“埃隆·马斯克，SpaceX，追寻迷人的未来世界”中报道过他。

四年后，康柏电脑公司以3.07亿美元的价格收购了这家公司。马斯克用这笔钱开办了另一家初创企业贝宝。

6

Oprah Winfrey was co-hosting a local talk show in Baltimore.

奥普拉·温弗莉在巴尔的摩主持本地脱口秀节目

According to the Huffington Post, Winfrey was fired from the 6 p.m. news slot at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV in 1977 at age 23.

据《赫芬顿邮报》报道，1977年温弗瑞23岁时，被巴尔的摩WJZ-TV电视台晚间6点档新闻栏目解雇。

In 1978, a 24-year-old Winfrey was recruited to co-host WJZ’s local talk show “People Are Talking.” While there, she also hosted the local version of “Dialing for Dollars.”

1978年，24岁的温弗瑞受雇共同主持WJZ的当地谈话节目《人们在交谈》，在那里，她还主持了地方版的《打电话赢美元》节目。

Winfrey remained in Baltimore throughout her mid- and late-20s, until moving to Chicago in 1983 to host “A.M. Chicago” for WLS-TV.

在25-30岁的这段时间，奥普拉·温弗瑞一直在巴尔的摩工作。直到1983年时，她才来到芝加哥主持WLS-TV电视台的脱口秀节目“A.M. Chicago”。

7

Sheryl Sandberg had met mentor Larry Summers and was getting a Harvard MBA.

雪莉·桑德伯格遇到恩师拉里 ·萨默斯并获得哈佛MBA学位。

At age 25, Sandberg had graduated at the top of the economics department from Harvard, worked at the World Bank under her former professor, mentor, and future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and had gone back to Harvard to get her MBA, which she received in 1995.

25岁时，桑德伯格从哈佛大学经济系毕业，在她的前教授、导师和未来的财政部长拉里·萨默斯领导下在世界银行工作，并回到哈佛攻读MBA，她于1995年获得了该学位。

She went on to work at McKinsey, and at age 29 was Summers’ Chief of Staff when he became Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary.

她继续在麦肯锡工作，29岁时，29岁时成为萨默斯的参谋长，后来成为比尔·克林顿的财政部长。

Her time at HBS was a ways before Google, but that experience helped her see the potential of the internet, she said in a 2012 commencement speech to HBS grads:

她在进入谷歌之前还在哈佛商学院读书，但这一经历帮助她看到了互联网的潜力，她在2012年向HBS毕业生发表演讲时表示：

“It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an awful lot,” Sandberg said. “My section, section B, tried to have HBS’s first online class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial up service (your parents can explain). We had to pass out a list of screen names, because it was unthinkable to put your real name on the internet. And it never worked.”

“我像你们一样坐在台下并不是很久远之前的事情，但是世界已经变化了太多。我曾尝试听哈佛商学院的第一节网络课程。我们那时使用一个AOL聊天室然后拨通服务(你的老爸老妈可以解释)。我们都有网名，如果你在互联网上使用真名简直是不可思议。它从来没有用过。”

8

Oracle founder Larry Ellison was working odd jobs as a programmer.

甲骨文创始人拉里·埃里森是一名程序员。

After moving to Berkeley, California, at 22, the college dropout turned billionaire Oracle founder used what he picked up in college and taught himself about computer programming. He found odd technical jobs at places like Fireman’s Fund, Wells Fargo, and AMPEX until finally landing at Amdahl Corp., where he worked on the first IBM-compatible mainframe system.

在22岁移居加州伯克利后，这位大学辍学的亿万富翁甲骨文创始人使用了他在大学里学到的东西，自学了计算机编程。他在Fireman’s Fund、富国银行和AMPEX等公司找到了一些专门的技术工作，最终进入了Amdahl公司，并在公司第一个IBM兼容的大型机系统上工作。

9

Former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was building a deep background in computer science.

前谷歌执行总裁埃里克·施密特在计算机科学领域积累了深厚的经验。

Schmidt spent six years as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, earning a master’s and Ph.D. at 27 for early work in networking computers and managing distributed software development.

埃里克·施密特曾在加州大学伯克利分校读了6年的研究生，并在27岁前取得了该校物理学硕士、博士学位。而他早期也主要致力于计算机网络和分布式管理软件的开发工作。

He spent those summers working at the famed Xerox PARC labs, which helped create the computer workstation as we know it. There, he met the founder of Sun Microsystems, where he had his first corporate job.

他那些年的夏天都在久负盛名的Xerox PARC实验室工作，这个实验室创造了计算机工作站。在这里，他遇见了太阳微系统的创始人，随后他在这家公司就职。

In his early years as a programmer, “all of us never slept at night because computers were faster at night.”

在他还是一个程序员的时候，他说“我们所有人晚上都不睡觉，因为计算机晚上的时候运转的更快些”。

10

Marissa Mayer had just started her job as Google’s 20th employee.

玛丽莎·梅耶尔刚刚开始担任谷歌第20任员工。

At 24, Mayer became employee No. 20 at Google and the company’s first female engineer. She remained with the company for 13 years before moving on to become the CEO of Yahoo.

在24岁的时候，梅耶尔是谷歌的第20名员工，她是谷歌的第一位女性工程师。在谷歌工作了13年后，她前往雅虎成为CEO。

Google didn’t have the sorts of lavish campuses it does now, Mayer said in an interview with VMakers, “During my interviews, which were in April of 1999, Google was a seven-person company. I arrived and I was interviewed at a ping pong table which was also the company’s conference table, and it was right when they were pitching for venture capitalist money, so actually after my interview Larry and Sergey left and took the entire office with them.”

那一年谷歌还没有现在的华丽的总公司，梅耶尔在接受VMakers的采访时说道：“1999年4月我接受面试的时候，谷歌只是个7人小公司。我到了就在一张乒乓球桌上接受了面试，那张乒乓球台也是公司的会议桌，那个时候他们正在寻求投资，所以在我的面试结束之后，拉里和瑟尔盖就走了，把整个办公室也搬走了。”

Since everyone in the office interviewed you in those days, Mayer had to come back the next day for another round.

因为那时每个谷歌的人都要面试她，所以梅耶尔第二天的时候又去接受另一轮面试了。

看完上面10位成功人士在25岁时做的事情，不知你如今的年龄有多大？在你25岁的时候，你想成为谁？做什么样的事情？请留言告诉我们吧。

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