Becoming a billionaire and anadiplosis
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Today’s stories in a nutshell:
🌼 People who found success late in life
✊ The rise of Volodymyr Zelensky in 8 short clips
🖼 Let’s talk art
✍️ Let’s learn English
🧩 Try a new game
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🌼 Late bloomers
Mark Zuckerberg is only a year older than me. This fact has always depressed me. The start of my working life coincided with the tech world startup explosion, so I’ve spent the last decade watching in awe as many people of my age and younger have become billionaires and business icons.
Is it too late for me to catch up, I wonder?
Studies suggest that my billionaire ambitions may still be alive! Research of 2.7 million US business startups between 2007 and 2014 found that less than 1% of high-performing startups were founded by 20-year-olds. The most successful startups had a founder aged 45. Contrary to popular belief, experience counts for something in the startup world, as older entrepreneurs have a much higher success rate.
Here are a few founders who hit it big later in life.
For another infographic that includes the ages of many more founders, click here.
Let’s look broader than the world of business. British comedian Ricky Gervais was 40 when The Office first debuted on the BBC. It feels like actor Samual L Jackson has been famous since, forever. But he only got his big break at the age of 45 when he played the iconic role of a Bible-verse-reading murderer in Pulp Fiction:
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men”.
Morgan Freeman was 52 when his career took off after his much more timid role in Driving Miss Daisy.
In the world of politics, Nelson Mandela was 45 when he started his sentence at Robben Island and 75 when he became South Africa’s first democratically elected president. Churchill was 65 when he became prime minister, and Joe Biden was 78 when he became the 46th US president.
If you feel disappointed with what you have achieved in life thus far, don’t worry, your glory years may still be ahead of you.
Good luck.
✊ Man of the moment: Volodymyr Zelensky
Speaking of actors who ran for president, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is well on his way to becoming Time magazine’s person of the year 2022. The former comedic actor has become the face of Ukraine’s resistance. He has put his life on the line in the service of his country. It’s hard not to be inspired by someone with so much skin in the game.
This short clip showcases eight key moments in his meteoric rise.
✍️ Learn a useful skill: Rhetorical devices
Why do most of us stop learning the theory of language after we leave school? Seeing that it’s the cornerstone of communication, becoming a lifelong language student seems like a fruitful endeavour.
Rhetorical devices, for example, are ways of arranging words or ideas to add colour and emotion to your writing, speeches or arguments. Overall, they help connect with an audience by making your communication more persuasive. Mirriam-Webster gives a few examples worth remembering:
Anadiplosis:
Repetition of a prominent and usually the last word in one phrase or clause at the beginning of the next.
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” – Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
Anaphora:
Repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses, especially for rhetorical or poetic effect.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.” - Winston Churchill
Apophasis:
The raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it.
"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience." – Ronald Reagan
Chiasmus:
An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases.
“My job is not to represent Washington to you,but to represent you to Washington.” - Barack Obama
Epistrophe:
Repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect.
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Learning language skills will lead to better communication. Better communication will lead to better relationships. Better relationships will lead to increased happiness. See what I did there? To learn more about rhetorical devices, check out 👉 31 Useful Rhetorical Devices.
🖼 Appreciating art: Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet
Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. His famous painting, Impression, Sunrise (1872), is a waterscape of his hometown of Le Havre, a city in Normandy. The painting anchored the name of the impressionist art movement.
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s - Wikipedia
See here for more of Monet’s work.