Paul Orfalea

Paul Orfalea could not learn the alphabet in second grade or sit still in class. He failed the year. The trouble continued: schools expelled him repeatedly, and he later described being ridiculed, shunned, or struck when he could not fit the classroom's expectations. School, he wrote, was hard on him and hard on his parents.

His parents did much more than tell him to try harder. Fortune reported that they took Paul to testers, tutors, therapists, special reading groups, and eye doctors, looking for a way he could learn. Still, the expulsions continued. When one administrator suggested that their thirteen-year-old son might learn to lay carpet, Paul remembered his mother coming home in tears and telling his father that she knew he could do more.

She was not predicting fame. She was paying attention. Paul wrote that his parents saw him as an individual; his mother talked with him and listened to him. She reminded him, too, that a report card did not measure everything that mattered. Away from the classroom, Paul started small ventures, watched his father's stockbroker at work, and learned by observing people and asking for help.

Orfalea eventually finished high school and college. At the University of Southern California, he relied on classmates for the writing in a group project and handled the photocopying; the exchange helped seed the idea for Kinko's. He opened the first shop in 1970 and built the business into a worldwide chain of more than 1,200 locations.

Dyslexia and hyperactivity were real obstacles, not proof that school did not matter. The help his parents sought did not make those years easy. What they supplied was persistence under discouraging evidence: more specialists, more attempts, and a refusal to reduce their son to the school's verdict. They stayed close enough to notice the practical abilities his grades missed.