When he was 12 years- old, he could not read, and he remained deficient in reading all his life. However, he could memorize entire lectures which was how he got through school. He became a famous general during WW II.

He was slow in school work and did not have a successful school experience, but later became a well- known movie producer and cartoonist.

Until he was 18, ... read virtually nothing but comic books but did show his writing skills. He sold one-liners for ten cents each to gossip columnists.

...taught herself to play the piano at only four years old!

This young boy had difficulty reading but was able to write some of the world's best loved stories.

..., who twice won the Nobel Prize, and discovered radium, was not allowed to become a member of the prestigious French Academy because she was a woman.

Before she was the diva we know now, she was just a 7-year-old girl with a dream to become a performer, but rejected for her school choir owing to her strong trademark vibrato.

She had a childhood fraught with poverty: she lived with her maternal grandmother for about six months while her mother worked, and circumstances were so dismal that she wore potato sacks for clothes – something the local children mocked her for. Through sheer will-power and determination, she became the first African-American woman to become a billionaire.

She was so poor that during the writing of her first book, she couldn’t afford to get the novel photocopied, much less buy a computer. And so she manually typed out each copy, sending them to prospective publishers, all of whom rejected it, until Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave the book a second chance after the CEO’s 8-year-old daughter became absolutely thrilled by it.