Ranging between the period from late teens to early thirties, the quarter-life crisis is the phase during which a person is transitioning to adult life but feels doubtful about their life. The term is comparable to midlife crisis but affects young adults who are facing difficulties in adapting to adulthood.

According to researchers, the core crisis of the problem that is the quarter-life crisis, is fitting in. People around their early twenties and thirties have the strongest desire to fit in and find a direction in their life. This is a common phase in a person’s life, which is why it’s important to realize that you are not alone.

The crisis isn’t faced by plain Jane or your average Joe, it affects famous people like Donald Trump, Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg during their early twenties and thirties. Here are some of the things they were doing during their quarter-life crisis.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

At the age of 25, Hillary Clinton had just graduated from Yale Law School, where she met Bill Clinton, who would later become the President of the United States. She began working at the Yale Child Study Center.

Donald Trump

At the age of 25, the young real estate developer took over his father’s real estate development company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, which has since been renamed to The Trump Organization. This was in 1971, and he also moved to Manhattan to be involved in larger building projects, through which he came to public recognition.

Richard Branson

At the young age of 22, he started his record label Virgin Records in 1972. Branson became successful with sales of Mike Oldfield’s debut album Tubular Bells, which hit the charts and sold over 5 million copies. Virgin Records later signed Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, and Genesis.

Warren Buffett

At the age of 25, Warren Buffet was working as an analyst. After earning his master’s in economics, he worked as an investment salesman before he became an analyst with Graham-Newman Corp. He left the firm to start his own partnership fund.

Arianna Huffington

At the age of 23, she published her book The Female Woman while accompanying her partner, British journalist, Henry Bernard Levin, to music festivals around the world for BBC. She met Levin in 1971.

J.K. Rowling

In 1990, Rowling was working as an English teacher in Portugal. On her way to London from Manchester, she came up with the idea for her Harry Potter series. It took her years to finish the book that would make her one of the wealthiest authors in the world.

Stephen King

At the age of 26, his first novel, Carrie, was accepted by the publisher Doubleday in 1973. King was working as an English educator at Hampden Academy in Maine just a few years before he became one of the most well-known horror writers in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg

At the young age of 25, Facebook had already changed the world but only turned cash-positive for the first time in 2009 when it reached 300 million users. The creation of social media became the new paradigm for reaching out to the masses.

Elon Musk

In 1995, Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in applied physics at age 24 to start his career in entrepreneurship. He started the web software company Zip2 along with his brother Kimbal Musk, which was purchased by Compaq for $307 million four years later.

Jeff Bezos

After graduating from Princeton University in 1986 at 22 years old, Bezos worked at different computer science companies on Wall Street, ultimately becoming D.E. Shaw’s youngest ever vice president in 1990 at the age of 26.

Steve Jobs

In 1976, when he was just 21 years old, Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, started Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage. Apple I was released in 1976, followed by Apple II in 1977. Jobs took Apple Computer public in December 1980.

Larry Ellison

Ellison bounced around several schools before arriving in Berkeley, California with little money. He progressed through technical jobs before he started Oracle. However, before the creation of Oracle, Ellison worked as a translator and a teacher in Italy.

Eric Schmidt

Schmidt was the first software engineer at Sun Microsystems in 1983. He earned his degree in computer engineering from UC Berkeley in 1982. His focus was on computer networking and distributed software development.

Bill Gates

At the age of 20 in 1975, Bill Gates founded Microsoft along with Paul Allen. In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft for an operating system for their upcoming personal computer. Gates offered the software although Microsoft didn’t actually have it, and it was purchased later from Seattle Computer Products.

Oprah Winfrey

In 1976, at the age of 22, Winfrey moved to Baltimore, Maryland to co-anchor WJZ-TV’s six o’clock news. She then joined Richard Sher as co-host of local talk show People Are Talking in 1978. She gained popularity and moved to Chicago to host AM Chicago, where she made her name.

In conclusion, the quarter-life crisis affects most young adults as they transition into adulthood. The crisis is about finding a direction in life and fitting in. As we’ve seen, even the most successful and famous people in the world have experienced the quarter-life crisis. By understanding that it’s a natural phase in life, it becomes easier to navigate through it.