THIS TIME LAST week, over 50,000 Round One CAO offers were winging their way to students around the country, with the updated Round Two offers to follow later this week.
The path to success doesn’t always run as expected, and if someone in your house didn’t get the points or offers they wanted, they may currently be feeling a little overwhelmed as they figure out what to do next.
Leaving Cert and CAO season can be, for some, the first reminder that life doesn’t always turn out as we intend it to. But as any accomplished businessperson will tell you, there’s no right or wrong way to achieve your goals.
If you’re looking for some inspiration right now as you examine your options for the future, here’s how some super-successful people (from multinational CEOs to Irish startup founders) unexpectedly got their own ‘big break’…
Chopra is known worldwide as an alternative health and meditation guru and is the author of 86 books. But until age 45 he was a practicing hospital doctor dealing with up to 55 patients at once.
“I didn’t have time to sleep. I was smoking cigarettes. I was a bit of a mess… so one day I decided to drop almost everything and leave,” he told Harvard Business Review. Chopra decided to start his own mind-body centre, which took off, and the rest is history.
A graduate of Griffith College’s Journalism degree, Stephen founded the social media analysis company Olytico in 2009, and has provided services to the likes of Fáilte Ireland, ESB and Liberty Insurance. But the jump from having his initial idea to making it work was a big one.
“The first year of business was challenging,” says Stephen. “I worked other jobs on the side, lived on beans and toast, and my ‘office’ was the kitchen table.” Then, in 2010, research Stephen had conducted into the Apple iPad was picked up by the BBC and the Washington Post.
From that I got an instant increase in enquiries and more credibility in the Irish market.
Oprah’s media career famously began with an unpaid internship at an affiliate of news broadcaster CBS in Nashville, Tennessee, her father’s home state. She later took a job as a TV reporter in Balimore, Maryland, but found her true calling when bosses moved her onto the breakfast show.
“It was like breathing to me. Like breathing. You just talk,” she said in a 1991 Academy Of Achievement interview.
As the commercial director of digital marketing agency Conker, Orla Veale says the idea of starting her own company was inspired by the Japanese concept of ikigai, which loosely translates to a “reason for being.” After applying the concept to her own life, “the result was the birth of Conker,” says Griffith College graduate Orla.
Our real big break came with a last minute phone call in the early stages of the business. A large multinational organisation was looking for some help with a difficult, time sensitive situation. Two extremely intense weeks followed but our success helped the vision for the future of the business click into focus.
Now the CEO of Dropbox, Houston started experimenting with coding when he was just 5 and worked on five different startups throughout his high school and college years. Nothing took off.
After forgetting his USB stick on a bus journey from New York to Boston in 2007, the idea for Dropbox was finally born. Speaking about his eventual big break to Forbes, Houston noted that “no one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that”.
Deasy spent her post-college years managing her dad’s Kildare shop, before joining her husband’s business and travelling the globe running photography workshops and photoshoots. So how did she go from that to being founder of Irish skincare company Pestle & Mortar?
“It was from travelling around… I noticed make-up artists using hyaluronic anti-ageing serums [on photoshoots],” she told Fora.ie. Sonia realised there was a gap in the market for hyaluronic products in Ireland, and decided to start her own skincare line.
Prior to getting the job as CEO of denim giant Levi Strauss, Bergh spent almost three decades with manufacturing giant Procter and Gamble, and rose up the ranks enough to catch the eye of headhunters.
That’s when calls began coming in gauging his interest at CEO roles with different companies. “Most of them weren’t very interesting,” he told this month’s Harvard Business Review. But while on a business trip in Beijing 2010, Chip got a phonecall that made him say “Wow” – from a headhunter in Levi Strauss.
Making your own plan for what to do next? At Griffith College there’s a huge range of CAO options open to you with Honours degree, Level 7 and Level 6 courses available in Business, Law, Computing, Design, Journalism and more. Discover Griffith College and find a course to suit you at griffith.ie.
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