A schoolteacher’s son from rural Gujarat had a dream, a dream that is now an everyday reality for countless Indians. Dhirubhai Ambani, quit his hometown and his humble beginnings to make it big in Yemen. He worked as a dispatch clerk and rose to the position of a manager. And that’s when he quit again. He quit a high paying comfortable job to take a chance that eventually bore him millions. Reliance commercial company started in 1942 changed the face of Indian Business. He established Reliance Industries in 1972 and started the equity cult in India. What the Tata’s and the Birla’s took centuries to establish, Dhirubhai did in a matter of years, owing to his business acumen and sharpness. As his two sons, Mukesh and Anil Ambani take the dinosaur of an empire for a walk around the world; its evident how quitting complacence took one man’s dream from rural India to Fortune 500.

One of the youngest billionaires in the world today, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is more than household name; it’s a social phenomenon. Zuckerberg’s interest in computer programming, though may seem like an unusual hobby, led him to create many interesting computer programs, with special emphasis on Communication channels. Most notable of his creations was a music player called Synapse that coordinated artificial intelligence to determine the listening behaviors of users. It got him job offers from giants like Microsoft, which he turned down to join Harvard. Then, of course there was no looking back. When Mark Zuckerberg rejected Microsoft, he quit an innate human desire to follow the herd and emphasized on education. He took chances, pushed boundaries and dared to look beyond what seemed possible or easy. He quit apprehension and conformity, creating a social world, self- sustaining on the Internet, through the millions that are now living his dream through zillions of wall posts every day.

What a typically well-placed techie he sounds like - Kevin Systrom graduated in Management sciences and Engineering majors from Stanford in 2006 and joined the all-pervading Google the same year. He stuck around till 2008 till he quit that job to follow his own dream. When he quit Google, he not only quit comfort and compliance, he quit well, GOOGLE! But that was definitely not a whim. A year later he founded Burbn inc. - an HTML5 based location sharing service. As CEO of Burbn Inc. he created the popular iPhone app Instagram. It took Instagram three months to reach its first million users, and a little more than a month after that to reach the second million.

The story of a superstar would consist of a lot of luck, a lot of hard work, a lot of drama. What we do not expect in the story is a mention of Bangalore transport service. Well, surprise! Our very own Rajni worked as a bus conductor in Karnataka before he turned to theatre and performed supersonic stunts with unbelievable ease. Who needs Shaolin when we’ve got Rajni! When Rajnikanth risked his lowly beginnings for a stint with stardom, he quit fear, he quit apprehension, and he quit the impulse to conform and keep on living the easy life. And just see how the risk paid off! A megastar with an unparalleled fandom, Rajni has written history all over Indian regional cinema!

A painful childhood made sure the brilliant Ray La Montagne stayed away from music for most part of his life and chose to work at shoe factory instead. After toiling 65 hours a week for years, he finally discovered his own voice thanks to the radio one early morning. He quit his defiance, his childhood animosity with the art and thankfully so. In the last ten years since he decided to become a singer-songwriter, his heady blues have entranced a generation of music lovers. What may seem like a fortunate turn of events was a will to quit bitterness, to quit mediocrity and gain not only fame but also a life forever steeped in Music.

Quite early in his career did Bill gates realize that when you intend to create a giant like Microsoft, school transcripts wouldn’t really count! He thus quit school, to sell software. All of 19, bill was an aspiring mathematics student at the prestigious Harvard University in Boston when he dropped out before ever graduating. But not before meeting his two future business partners, Steve Balmer and Paul Allen. Upon forming Microsoft, they developed an advanced version of the old programming language BASIC, and thing took off from there. Bill wanted to someday make computers affordable for the average person. And so he did. Bill quit conformity; he quit the degree to create a trend we all find our everyday lives dependent on- Microsoft Windows.

When a student from California State University quit school in 1968 and made a short film ‘Amblin’, the Cash registers started ringing for the award-winning director, Steven Spielberg. The director of the top-grosser Jurassic Park and much acclaimed The Color Purple was a college drop out. He turned his back on a degree to pursue his dreams and hold an Acedemy Award in his hand. He quit classes, he quit compliance, he quit tradition and created life size dinosaurs. That’s some big quitting going on there!

Though he quit Washington University in St Louis to become a WWII pilot for the Navy, Jack Crawford Taylor’s name is more often remembered in context of him being among the richest American Businessmen. Worth around $7.4 billion, he is ranked the 18th richest American and 40th richest man in the world. All he did was quit an ordinary life and become a car salesman. He took his one measly dream the distance he wanted to and today that dream is better known as a worldwide enterprise namely -Rent a Car.

When Ralph Lauren left school without completing his degree he decided to break the pattern. And that break in made him an international super brand- Ralph Lauren and Polo. He started by working for Brooks Brothers as a salesman. He later opened a necktie store, which featured some ties that he designed himself. Ralph Lauren quit monotony for his passion, he quit traditional education for an unconventional stream of work and he quit a regular job to move from neckties to international runways. And the catwalk carries on!

A professional photographer, Boman Irani had quite a few stints before had the world laughing their guts off as the iconic Dr. J. C Ashthana. He worked as a waiter and room service staff at Taj Mahal Palace & Tower before joining his mother to run his ancestral bakery shop. He also set up an Uncle Chips franchise. All this while he was determined to not succumb to the daily humdrums and forget where his heart lay. . He started his career as theatre artiste with a cameo in Alyque Padamsee's play ‘Roshni’. He acted in countless plays before his Bollywood debut in the film ‘Josh’ Rest as they say, is history, and that too on the silver screen. Boman quit the easy way out, he quit the instinctive urge to conform and settle in the comfort zone and in the bargain saw himself and his dream play out on the big screen!

Famed Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw dropped out of the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. Not very happy with the standardization of the curriculum he decided to end the chapter of his schooling, which he believed deadened the spirit and stifled the intellect. And surprisingly, that move lead to a new beginning in his life. Today he’s not just known as one of the greatest playwrights of the century but also as the drop out who co-founded the brilliant London School of Economics. All he had to do was quit traditional mentoring of a restrictive education system.

Quentin Tarantino. The name brings swords, bloodshed and blockbusters to mind. It was not an easy journey though. Tarantino quit his school in the freshman year itself and worked at a Video Rental store. This is where he learnt all he did about film and Hollywood. Instead of continuing education and getting a degree, Tarantino joined an Acting school. Tarantino quit the accepted path where school is believed to be the cornerstone of shaping one’s career and decided to shape it himself and is today a Hollywood A-lister. After all its only when you quit fear, that you can- Kill Bill!

After his family lost everything in the 1997 stock market crash, Gurbaksh Chahal, founder and CEO of gWallet, a virtual currency platform for social media, quit high school at 16, determined to make it big. And he did make it big when he formed Click Agents, an Internet advertising company, which he sold two years later for $40 million. In 2004, he launched a second company, BlueLithium – the next generation in Internet advertising, Yahoo! announced that it was acquiring BlueLithium for $300 million in cash in 2007. He took the path less taken, when his peers were laboring away to become doctors and engineers, Chahal was discovering the wonders of the Internet and what opportunities it provided education or capital notwithstanding. Chahal quit helplessness; he quit dejection and the submission that comes with it, to create thriving business opportunities out of practically nothing.

The very Magical J.K Rowling’s story would be no less a bestseller than the spectacular Harry Potter series. Joanne Kathleen Rowling admits to having delayed following her only one true ambition of becoming a writer for the fear of failure and poverty. She went through a series of jobs, most of them secretarial. She found her jobs boring. The only consolation she had was in writing. Joanne wrote feverishly- many short stories and several abandoned novels. However, her work ended up in a box and her self-esteem declined. A single mother, not eligible for childcare, Joanne was forced into unemployment and public assistance. Public assistance barely covered rent and food, and Joanne could not afford even a second-hand typewriter. When she realized she had nothing left to lose, she took the courage to find out her true value as a writer. J.K Rowling quit fear, failure and powerlessness. She quit dependence and went on to write the biggest phenomenon in modern popular fiction of our age.