How Being Blind Lead To Billions

By definition, an Entrepreneur is someone who turns challenging obstacles into glory and success. You must accept the hand your dealt and turn whatever little you have into something game-changing.

This notion is something that has become lost amid startups' multi-million dollar rounds of seed funding and aid from the most established mentors of today. The rule seems to have become that - to be an entrepreneur - you must have some serious dough and have an untouchable network of successful connects.

Here's an inspiring story that'll bring the old badass notion of entrepreneurship back in sight... Well, not literally. Herb Greenberg lost his sight at age 10. In 1961, after a nine years in the academic world, he founded Caliper, a consulting firm that specializes in assessing job applicants.

Caliper now has 250 employees in 13 offices worldwide. Not bad for a blind man from Brooklyn, huh? Here is what Herb has to say on overcoming adversity as he tells Elite Daily on how he made his first couple million and established his name among the business Elite:

On Proving Everybody Wrong:

When I grew up, if you were blind, you didn't have many options. If you were lucky, you ran a newsstand. Maybe you tuned pianos. I've never done either of those. Growing up in Brooklyn was wonderful, but the New York City board of education wanted my parents to send me to a school for the blind. My parents wouldn't allow it. One day, the police came to our door and said, "You have to send your kid to school." My parents said they would, but not to some institution far away. I went to public school and graduated top of my class.

On Never Letting Anything Stop You:

Being blind never stopped me from doing much of anything, really. I was on the wrestling team. In high school, I ran for vice president. I lost, but what the hell; it was a good election. When I finished my Ph.D., cum laude, I applied to literally 600 jobs. I was offered 85 interviews, but when they found out I was blind, that number was reduced to three.

On Turning Lemons Into Lemonade:

I realized the job-interview process was broken. I started Caliper to help companies see employees for who they really were. To be able to really say, "Who is this human being?" So would I have started Caliper had I not gone blind? Probably not. What would be my motivation? Really, when I was growing up, I wanted to be a lawyer. I was going to be Perry Mason.

But Caliper is what I'm most proud of in life. There are tens of thousands of people who are working jobs that they are happy to be in because of our work.

In 2012, Caliper is renowned as the authority on human capital, management consulting, and fixing broken firms in need of top-performers. Moreover, Herb Greenberg has become a legend, essentially.

From Harvard Business Review case studies to motivational books, countless business voices have tried to learn from Herb's success. Herb went from being a blind boy in Brooklyn to the Father of the modern recruiting and hiring system for Fortune 500 companies.

Elite.