John Sculley

He would come to be known as a bold entrepreneur, a brilliant marketer, and an American businessman with the ability to turn around an ailing company. 

But as a child, John Sculley felt like a failure. “I felt I was just inferior,” he said. “It really gave me a complex.” 

Where his classmates shared their ideas with ease, Sculley struggled to even get the words out. He stuttered and stammered, plagued by the disconnect between what formed in his brain and what came from his mouth. He couldn’t even answer the telephone, much less speak in class. His schoolwork suffered. Teachers wrote him off as unintelligent. By middle school, his grades were average at best.

That’s when he told himself: “I’m not going to have my life held back because of this speech impediment. I’m going to overcome it.” Once Sculley unlocked his ability to learn, he developed a lifelong passion for discovery that would guide him to lead some of the world’s top companies, including Apple and PepsiCo. But this took extraordinary dedication. It almost never happened.

As a child, Sculley began to see a medical hypnotist who taught him that many people who stutter can sing clearly, without a hitch in their voice. He found that singing lifted the pressure of communicating. His words began to flow, and his confidence grew. He kept at it for years. “It was just sheer persistence,” he said. “I was absolutely determined that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life not being able to communicate and do the things I saw other kids doing.”

By the time he enrolled at Brown University, he had conquered his speech impediment and was ready to get serious with his studies. His stutter had left him feeling locked away, shut off from the outside world. Now he felt his mind blossom. “I became a very good student,” he said. “I took tough and challenging courses. When I got out of school, I said, ‘I’m going to take the thing that was a big obstacle from my early life, and I’m going to make it a strength in my life going forward.’”

And so, learning, and hands-on learning in particular, became a hallmark of Sculley’s life. When he went to work for PepsiCo, he delivered soft drinks and reset supermarket shelves, repairing tin bodega roofs in the hot Arizona sun in exchange for getting a Pepsi sign in the window. His friends asked why he, a promising future executive with an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, would accept such menial tasks, he said, “Because I believe in hands-on learning. I want to learn—I want to see it firsthand and get my hands on it.”

That experience proved invaluable to Sculley’s success at Pepsi, where he became the company’s youngest marketing vice president in 1967. When he joined Pepsi, the soft drink giant was dwarfed by Coca-Cola’s dominance, outsold 10-1 in half of the United States. By the time he left in 1982, Pepsi was the top consumer packaged goods in America and outsold Coca-Cola—due in large part to Sculley’s Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign that featured lifelong Coke drinkers choosing Pepsi in blind taste tests.

“When I got the chance to become marketing vice president of Pepsi—when I was just turning 30 years old—the reason I was able to succeed was because I had a mental picture in my head of what happened throughout the whole process of being somebody who made soft drinks, and delivered those soft drinks, and displayed those soft drinks,” Sculley said. “A lot of the marketing programs we came up with which were successful at Pepsi were things that I had gained a perspective on back in those early days of being a trainee.”

Sculley’s huge success at Pepsi had captured the attention of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who lured him away from the soft-drink company—where Sculley had risen to president—with an evocative pitch: “He looked up at me and just stared at me with the stare that only Steve Jobs has, and he said, ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?’ And I just gulped, because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.”

Again, Sculley’s passion for learning pushed him to follow his curiosity. He accepted the job as Apple’s CEO, much to the consternation of Silicon Valley skeptics, who wondered what value a soft-drink salesman would bring to the fledgling computer company. They didn’t realize just who Sculley was—an inquisitive and driven executive who brought not only marketing expertise but also hands-on, self-taught consumer electronics experience dating back to his invention of the cathode ray tube for color television when he was just 14.

His decade at Apple was a roller coaster—he and Jobs clashed so intensely that Jobs left the company and didn’t return until after Sculley resigned in 1993—but he managed to boost sales from $800 million to $8 billion and succeed in mass-marketing Macintosh personal computers, a considerable feat in the days before most people had computers in their homes. Among Sculley’s accomplishments was the “test drive a Mac” promotion that allowed customers to take home a personal computer and return it, at no charge, if they didn’t like it.

“It wasn’t magical what I did,” Sculley said. “It was just based on my experience selling Pepsi and competing against one of the largest and most successful consumer brand in the world, Coca-Cola. Silicon Valley didn’t know this, but many of those consumer techniques were very transferable to high-tech products—at a time when there really was not consumer marketing for high-tech products.”

After Apple, Sculley spent the years that followed establishing himself as an investor and tech entrepreneur, founding and advising a variety of companies, some that fizzled and some that grew to become billion-dollar ventures. Along the way, he also found himself speaking—about his Apple experience, his marketing expertise, and that stutter that once threatened to hold him back.

“I do a lot of public speaking. I do a lot of television. I couldn’t have imagined back when I was 15 years old that I could ever stand up in front of a class and even talk to my fellow students,” he said recently. “What was an impediment and could have sent my life in an entirely different direction has actually enabled me to keep my mind alert. That lifelong learning never stops.”

It’s tempting to accept our constraints, to shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s what life handed me. But doing so could deny the world our true potential. So, when you think of what’s holding you back, think about the trajectory of John Sculley. Once he made the decision to take that leap over his most daunting hurdle, he found something extraordinary waiting just beyond it.

Can you, like Sculley, take your biggest obstacle—and turn it into your greatest strength?