By his own count, Jeremy Padawer had moved eight times before he turned 13, bouncing around the Deep South, perpetually the new kid. That’s the kind of childhood that can leave a person either resigned or relentless, and Padawer chose relentless.

As a teenager, he sat down and wrote 1,000 letters to what he called the most remarkable, well-known people of the 20th century and asked each of them the same thing: What has been your greatest accomplishment?

The point wasn’t autographs. As he explained on Instagram, where he recently shared one of the replies, he wanted to understand what actually drove accomplished people and how they defined success when left to define it themselves. A kid who couldn’t count on staying anywhere was trying to reverse-engineer how to build a life that amounts to something.

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