Soichiro Honda cleaned the toilets at Honda HQ. Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Co., felt a dirty restroom signaled poor leadership. He insisted that everyone, including himself, clean toilets to practice humility. Honda believed you could judge a company by its bathrooms.

Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, believed in staying curious and active no matter your age. In his 50s, when many people might slow down, Morita started learning completely new hobbies like skiing, tennis, and scuba diving. Friends were surprised that a busy Sony chairman

David Ogilvy had an unusual creative ritual: He wrote ads after half a bottle of rum and Handel’s music. This unorthodox routine helped him loosen up creatively. Ogilvy admitted he wasn’t a naturally gifted copywriter, “lousy” in his words, but a very good editor who would

Benjamin Franklin had a strange morning habit: Taking daily “air baths” in the nude. By Franklin’s own account, he would sit naked in cold air for 30-60 minutes each morning, either reading or writing. He preferred this gentle “tonic” over cold water baths, finding it pleasant

Walmart’s founder Sam Walton studied his competitors so closely he once got arrested crawling around their store floors with a tape measurer. Walton was obsessed with learning from others. In the 1980s, he struck up a friendship with some Brazilian retailers and later visited

Every single morning, Martha Stewart drinks a green juice made from vegetables she grows herself. It’s the first thing she consumes each day. Martha says, “I start my day religiously with my own homemade green juice.” Martha has shared the exact recipe on her website: it

Mark Zuckerberg once set a wild challenge: He only ate meat that he personally killed for a whole year. In 2011, at age 27, Zuckerberg decided to learn where his food comes from by doing something extreme: If he wanted meat, he had to kill the animal himself. This meant he

J.P. Morgan made decisions on the spot and he kept meetings brutally short. Morgan hated long meetings and often kicked people out within seconds if they didn’t get to the point. He was so quick to decide that peers nicknamed him “Yes-or-No Morgan”. Behind the scenes he

In 1922, Albert Einstein wrote a single sentence about happiness... a message so valuable it sold for $1.56 million almost a century later. The moment happened in Tokyo, Japan, in November 1922. Einstein had just found out he’d won the Nobel Prize and was traveling in the

Behind Marilyn Monroe’s glamorous image was a lifelong secret habit: She was a passionate bookworm. Growing up in foster homes and orphanages, Norma Jeane (Marilyn’s real name) found escape and self-education in books. Marilyn owned a personal library of over 400 books, ranging

Oscar Wilde had an unusual writing habit: He lived in the details and once spent an entire day debating over a single comma in a poem. In 1884, Wilde joked that he was “immensely busy” one morning removing a comma from his proof, only to put it back in the afternoon. This

Liu Bei, the founding emperor of one of ancient China’s Three Kingdoms, started off as a street vendor selling straw sandals and mats. As a boy in the 2nd century, Liu Bei lost his father and survived by weaving mats and shoes with his mother to earn a meager living. Fate

Giorgio Armani was 41 years old when he started his own fashion label. He initially planned to be a doctor, not a designer. His love for fashion came when he got a job dressing store displays and saw what the customers were reacting to. So, at 41 years old, with just a

Coco Chanel revolutionized women’s fashion by using a fabric once only fit for men’s underwear. In the 1910s, Chanel shocked the fashion world by making chic dresses out of jersey, a cheap, stretchy material then used mainly for men’s underwear. Why? It was comfortable,

Ralph Lauren started his fashion empire with nothing more than a few handmade ties in a single drawer. In 1967, the Bronx-born designer borrowed a desk drawer in a New York showroom to launch his first line of men’s neckties under the brand name “Polo”. He had no fancy store,

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak quietly gave away $10 million of his own stock to reward early Apple employees who had been left out of the company’s riches. In 1980, when Apple went public, some of the garage team that built Apple didn’t receive stock options - a decision

Did you know Sam Altman began his tech journey as a child, dismantling a Macintosh computer at just 8 years old out of sheer curiosity? By age 12, he had launched his first business, selling homemade online baseball card deals to earn money. Altman’s early passion for

Did you know when Howard Schultz was 7, he came home to find his father injured and jobless. His dad, a truck driver, had broken his ankle at work and had no health insurance or worker’s compensation. The family was left with no income during his recovery. Years later, when

Did you know Thomas Edison’s entire laboratory complex went up in flames and the 67-year-old inventor who just lost everything responded... with optimism? On the evening of December 10, 1914, a massive fire destroyed 10 buildings at Edison’s West Orange, NJ. The inferno

Did you know Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest Americans of all time, once gave away his biggest steamship for free during the Civil War? The man known as “The Commodore” donated his fastest vessel, named The Vanderbilt, to the U.S. Navy in 1862. This ship, built at a