A career doesn't move linearly, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously advised— it can ratchet up suddenly with one critical insight, meeting, or opportunity.
You call it a big break.
Every success story has one.
Even luminaries like Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Jobs, and Howard Schultz had a moment where the path of their future clicked into focus.
Here are the big breaks that helped these execs build 10-digit fortunes.
Richard Branson discovered a singer who became a huge success.
When Richard Branson was 16, he started a magazine called Student. But his big break came six years later when he opened a recording studio and brought in a singer named Mike Oldfield.
Oldfield released "Tubular Bells," a mega-single that would stay on the U.K. charts for 247 weeks.
"On the back of that, we built a record company,"he told us, "and one thing led on to another from there."
Henry Ford impressed the mayor of Detroit.
In 1898, Henry Ford won the loyalty of Detroit mayor William C. Maybury after he built a carburetor, for which Maybury awarded him a patent.
Maybury would prove instrumental in helping Ford become an automobile maker.
"Maybury's support, combined with Ford's bold ideas and charisma, helped assemble a group of investors who contributed some $150,000 to establish the Detroit Automobile Company in early August 1899,"says History.com.
That allowed Ford to quit his day job at the Edison Illuminating Company — and found the companies that would make the first mass production cars.
Bill Gates landed an IBM contract.
In 1980, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and was leading a tiny company called Microsoft that was trying to worm its way into the nascent personal computer industry.
He — and the company — soon got a giant break, in the form of IBM.
Big Blue wanted to bring a cheap personal computer to market fast. It contracted Microsoft to provide the operating system. At the time, it didn't have one to sell, but soon cobbled one together.
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