Anna Wintour

Her siblings devoured political theory at Oxford and Cambridge.

Anna devoured fashion magazines.

Eight newspapers every weekend.

Every fashion publication she could find.

While her siblings prepared for careers in law and social causes, she studied hemlines and cultural shifts with scholarly intensity.

I was so desperate to get out in the world and get on with things, she explained about leaving school at 16.

Her family found her fascination with fashion incomprehensible.

I've always been a joke in my family, Anna later admitted, that I always thought I'm deeply unserious.

The irony is that Anna's unserious pursuit required more discipline than any degree.

She wasn't avoiding rigor, but applying it differently.

Fashion was cultural anthropology, business strategy, and visual communication.

Full stop.

Every magazine was a textbook.

Every trend was data.

In the face of my brother's and sister's academic success, I felt I was rather a failure, she recalled.

Anna, like so many of our outliers and perhaps like you yourself, felt overlooked and underestimated.

She would turn it into rocket fuel.

While her siblings shaped policy and law, she would shape how power itself presented to the world.

What her family couldn't see, because it didn't look like what they expected, was that Anna was a learning machine.

This commitment to vacuuming up everything about fashion, it was building mastery.