How Starbucks Became a $100B Success Story | Howard Schultz | From Poor Boy To Billionaire

there's not a single person on this

planet who haven't heard of starbucks

world's biggest coffee house company but

did you know that the

former ceo of starbucks howard schultz

was born and raised in poverty barely

making ends meet

and when things got really tough he even

had to sell his blood couple of times

this is the success story of howard

schultz how he went from living in

poverty

and struggling for money to survive to

transforming

starbucks into a 100 billion dollar

company and he was just a young boy who

never stopped dreaming

and here is why you shouldn't stop too

he was born

in a very poor family he spent his

childhood

living in a small one-bedroom apartment

from a public housing projects

his father was an army vet and a truck

driver

and spent most of his life working low

paid jobs

when howard was only 7 years old

while delivering diapers his father fell

on the ice

and broke his leg and because of this he

was

fired from his job and with no medical

insurance

and no savings his family was struggling

for money

that image of his father laying on the

couch feeling hopeless

crushed and defeated left a permanent

mark in his memory

it was one of the biggest defining

moments in howard's life

and to get away from all of these

problems he used to sit on the staircase

in his building

dreaming of a better life he played

football in high school

and earned an athletic scholarship to go

to college but he didn't want to play

sports

and decided to major in communications

so to pay for college he had to take

student loans

and worked many odd jobs to make ends

meet

few times he even had to sell his blood

for

money to survive after graduating from

college

howard worked at a ski lodge and as a

salesman but he had a desire to work at

starbucks

at that time starbucks had three owners

and only sold

coffee beans so at the age of 29

after a full year of convincing the

owners to hire him

he finally got a job at starbucks while

on a business trip to italy

he walked into an italian coffee shop

and he was

fascinated by his experience while

drinking coffee

he was amazed by the fact that the

owners of the coffee shops

actually knew their customers and they

even called them by their names while

serving them coffee

excited he traveled back to the u.s

trying to convince the starbucks owners

to accept these incredible new ideas but

the owners

rejected him so howard quit starbucks

and went on to create his own

coffee company called il journale but he

had no money to fund this

company in the course of the year i

spent trying to raise

money i spoke to 242 people

and 217 of them said no

try to imagine how disheartening it can

be

to hear that many times why your idea is

not worth

investing in it was a very humbling time

but eventually enough people believed in

his vision

and decided to invest in his business he

worked

extremely hard to open his first coffee

shop where he could replicate the

experience he had in italy

and finally implement his ideas

after a few years starbucks went

bankrupt

and howard bought the company and became

ceo of starbucks he rebranded his

company with the starbucks name

and expanded across the united states

today

starbucks has more than 30 000 stores

around the world and market value over

100 billion dollars and howard has an

advice for you

in life you can blame a lot of people

and you can

wallow in self-pity or you can pick

yourself up

and say listen i have to be responsible

for myself

i believe life is a series of near

misses

a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not

luck at all

it's seizing the day and accepting

responsibility for your future

it's seeing what other people don't see

and pursuing that vision

i feel so strongly that the reason i'm

here

is i dreamed big dreams i dreamed the

kind of dreams that

other people said would not be possible

i cannot

offer you any specific secret recipe for

success

the perfect plan how to reach the

pinnacle of success in the business

but my own experience suggests that

starting from scratch

and achieving much more than what i

dream about is quite possible

but if you wait for the perfect

conditions you'll never

get anything done but the good thing is

you can make a decision and take control

now remember something a year from now

you may wish you had started today

so what's your story

you