1. 1 John D. Rockefeller was the son of a con artist. Rockefeller left school at 16 years old, determined to earn $100,000 in his lifetime.

2. 2 By the time he retired in 1902, he was worth $200 million, and his wealth was in excess of one billion dollars by the time of his death, aged 97.

3. 3 Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire in 1759, the son of a self-educated tenant farmer. He received little formal education and worked as a farm labourer.

4. 4 His poetry and prose writing, both in Scots language and in English with a Scots dialect, have given him the status of Scotland’s national poet and a world-wide reputation.

5. 5 At the age of 17 Henry Ford left his family’s farm to become an apprentice machinist in Detroit, and became a pioneer in the American motor industry.

6. 6 His commitment to building an affordable car made motoring accessible for normal people, rather than being the preserve of the rich elite.

7. 7 Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in nineteenth Century Missouri, receiving no formal education beyond the age of 11 and serving an apprenticeship as a printer.

8. 8 After an unsuccessful stint as a miner, Clemens found success as a writer. Using the pen name Mark Twain, Clemens became a giant of American literature, his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer regarded as a classic.

9. 9 Albert Einstein failed his Polytechnic entrance exam. Working in the Swiss patent office, he was passed over for promotion due to his failure to ‘fully master machine technology’.

10. 10 He went on win the Nobel prize in Physics and to be recognised as arguably the greatest scientific mind of the Twentieth Century, his name a by-word for genius.