Well Linus Torvaltz(sp?) tried to write a kernel, and he succesed OVERNIGHT. The point is that he tried to write a peice of software, not be a famous programer. He succeded at both.

UPDATE:I meant that he became a pop-culture icon (admit it, out of the open-source community, he is probably the most famous to the rest of the world) He became this because he started work on linux, and got many others to help. Linux became a success almost overnight and so did Linus. My point is that one's immidiate goals should not be to become famous, but to create good things. With the second comes the first. Oh and I have actualy read a bit. Linux became popular with the hacker culture in the mather of one or two years. If you look at the original mesages to comp.os.minix, Linux was growing extremly rapidly in the early days.