Hart Main was just a 13-year-old boy when he founded a startup business, a candle business. Hart would always tease his sister about how her scented candles would be so girly is their scents and their appeals, his solution, start a scented candle business for boys and men. “For a startup, ManCans is doing well, averaging 300 orders a week. And if it takes a while for the Marysville, Ohio-based business to grow to the point where it’s selling 3,000 or 30,000 candles a week, Main has time. After all, he’s only 13.” Clearly, he is doing well for himself. One thing that I find very unique about this young entrepreneur is that his business originally was a joke, and that the fun of it is a large driving factor. What specifically inspires me about him and his story is that he started this when he was just 13, and while his parents definitely helped, him being 13 years old while being in the ‘eye of the storm’ is truly inspiring. His story also further proves that innovation does not have to come from experts. This all comes together to teach the principal that innovation can be a fun process, but also on that is not easy, we can’t pretend that his parents didn’t help him after all.

Josh Feinsilber was just an average high schooler who decided to put $100 into a business idea, which is now a multi-million-dollar business that many high schoolers (like me) have come to love- Gim Kit. Gim Kit is a learning app that is used to help students better engage with learning through fun games that can be played during class. What is unique about Josh and this business is that he wasn’t getting much out of the classroom environment, which is not something that I’d expect from a person who develops a learning app, because I’d expect them to come from an educational background. What drives Josh is to make it easier and more enjoyable for students around the world to be educated, and his idea of a learning app is very interesting, because often fun and school are not associated with each other. What inspires me about him is that he took a situation that was not enjoyable, boring classrooms, and got an idea to make it more fun. It also inspires me that he was just a 16-year-old when he started his company. I think that we can all learn from Josh that we should try to innovate in places that we do not usually like to deal with.

One of my best friends from back in Tennessee, Jacob (whose last name I won’t say), went to Jail earlier this year in May after some “Tom-foolery.”

After being pulled over he was arrested and spent a weekend in jail. The jail that he was in was the Loudon County Jail (a rough jail) and he was incarcerated with many messed up people which included a rapist. The time he was there was very rough and a bad experience overall. There was even a moment he recalled when an inmate was ‘flipping out’ and started yelling at the cops and getting very aggressive with them. In the end, he was released, and the charges against him we dropped, but the experience will always be with him. Interestingly, I have seen a lot of growth in him ever since he’s gotten out, and in particular he’s been an entrepreneur. Since getting out he’s started a pressure and window washing company and has been doing well with that. The reason why there is merit in this post about my friend is because in the matter of months he has really turned his life around. I hope that we all learn from his situation that we can all turn our lives around.

Babur Jahid, a biology student at Carleton State University, is a 21-year-old Afghani man with a social enterprise called “You See Clear.”

You See Clear is a business to help make eyeglasses more affordable in his home country of Afghanistan. Along with eyeglasses, he likewise wants to make healthcare in general more affordable. While his ideas might seem farfetched, he thinks that they are ones that can be done. The WHO estimates that “More than 400,000 people are blind and roughly 1.5 million are visually impaired. Each year, about 25,000 people lose vision in one eye, a condition that disproportionally affects women.” This being a huge issue is a further motivator for him as well. Babur was born in the same year the Taliban took over the country, so he had to flee to Pakistan for safety, and he has actually seen Taliban militants beat up his father. This goes to show how personal this issue is for him, as he has faced many issues from the region where he was born. Babur has gone through many high education systems and is a very educated man. His plans to revolutionize the eyecare and healthcare system are truly commendable, and what I’ve learned from him is that I, as an entrepreneur, should look back on my childhood, and see if I can make a difference in a difficulty that I experienced.