Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx with only a $5000 investment, has made Forbes Billionaire's List this year. She experienced a tragedy at 16. While riding a bike around her cul-de-sac in Clearwater, FL, she saw a car run over and kill her best friend, right in front of her. "I think that when you witness death at age 16, there's a sense of urgency about life," she says. "The thought of my mortality-I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be anytime that your number's up." (Both of her prom dates died in horrible circumstances.)
The writer Dave Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, and wanted to be a cartoonist. When he was in college at the University of Illinois, both his parents died of cancer within six months on one another, and he was completely on his own at the age of 21. He was made the guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher, so he had to drop out of college to support the family. He later said: "On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There's a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certaing amount of time to act. And you want to get started."
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