Results for "the accidental" in Professionals & Academics

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and...

In a story reminiscent of A Year in Provence and We Bought a Zoo, a spontaneous drive from San Francisco to wine country leads a harried corporate executive and his family to a dilapidated 19th century Victorian home. They set out to return the house to its former grandeur—a journey that...

The Accidental Billionaires is the inspiration behind the Oscar winning film, The Social Network, dramatising Zuckerberg’s success and proving you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies… Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg – an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius – were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university’s entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students.

This is the story of how a chance encounter led to romance, marriage, and a partnership covering a half century of creative philanthropy by Michael and Winsome Dunn McIntosh. In the 1970s, they began using an unexpected inheritance to expand the protection of America’s natural resources through life-giving early support to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club’s legal arm.

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

When it comes to civil service, William James has been there, done that. Starting at the lowest rung in federal service, he achieved the rare feat of climbing to the highest levels of leadership, shaping decisions that impacted millions. The Accidental Executive chronicles William’s remarkable career from a GS-1 clerk handling routine paperwork to the federal Senior Executive Service, balancing mission and bureaucracy while navigating the revolution of global technological change.

When I bounced the idea of An Accidental Life off Jim Browne, my financial manager with a keen understanding of the human condition, he said that all of us benefit from serendipity, from the accidental life. (We in fact met by happy accident.) He added that my life was and is typical, or perhaps a tad off the norm. Surely he's correct in that we all benefit from fortuitous events, but I think he's incorrect in that such events in my life are typical or normal.

Reddit hails itself as 'the front page of the Internet'. It's the sixth most-visited website in the world -- and yet, millions have no idea what it is. They should be paying attention. We Are the Nerds takes listeners inside this captivating, maddening enterprise, whose army of obsessed users have been credited with everything from solving crimes and spurring millions in charitable donations to seeding alt-right fury and even landing Donald Trump in the White House.

When I bounced the idea of an accidental life off Jim Browne, he said that all of us benefit from serendipity, from the accidental life. He added that my life was and is typical, or perhaps a tad off the norm. Surely he's correct in that we all benefit from fortuitous events, but I think he's incorrect in that such events in my life are typical or normal. I feel quite strongly, and without a scintilla of evidence, that I outrank most other people in both number and impact of life-changing events, or, perhaps, I am just more aware of them.