- Success! Or so you thought -

At 26, Albert Einstein wrote four articles that participated in the foundation of modern physics, without much scientific literature to which he could refer or many scientific colleagues with whom he could discuss the theories. Three of those were on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and relativity.

At 18, Michael Dell started PC's Limited in his university dorm room, from which he sold computers.

Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Mihailovic Brin were both 23-year-old PhD. students when they founded a simple search engine which was to revolutionise the Internet world. Google registered an average of 250 million searches per day as of February 2003.

It took William Henry Gates III and an associate 8 weeks to develop an Altair emulator, and then the BASIC interpreter, en route to setting up the software company MicroSoft which was to change the face of technology at home and in the workplace forever. And all this while a 20-year-old third-year student at Harvard University. Which he didn't graduate from.

Tadeusz Rybczynski was a postgraduate student when he wrote a thesis on Factor Allocation in International Trade. It would later win him the Nobel Prize in Economics.

At 21, Jonathan Ng struggled to memorise the Fama-French three-factor regression method and was frustrated when asked to propose a model for the appreciation of the real exchange rates of transitional economies such as those of the Baltic countries, Poland and the Czech Republic.