Gabriel García Márquez

Wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) during an intensive roughly 18-month period while in serious financial difficulty, going on to win the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

By his own account, modeled the narrative voice of his fiction -- recounting fantastical events in the same matter-of-fact tone as everyday ones -- directly on his grandmother Tranquilina Iguaran's oral storytelling.

Sustained parallel careers in journalism and fiction across his life, later founding the Fundacion Gabo to mentor young Latin American journalists.

Worked as a journalist and largely unrecognized novelist for roughly two decades before One Hundred Years of Solitude's success.

Two decades of largely unrecognized work before his breakthrough is the basis for the profile's persistence score. Persistence

While writing the novel, he and his wife went into debt -- he sold his car and pawned household goods -- to sustain uninterrupted writing time, with no guarantee the book would be published or succeed.

Sustaining serious financial hardship for an uncertain creative outcome is the basis for the profile's risk_tolerance score. Risk Tolerance

A short editorial he wrote at an editor's request for the newspaper El Espectador impressed the staff enough to turn into an unplanned, ongoing column -- the opening that launched his journalism career.

Recognizing and acting on an unplanned professional opening is the basis for the profile's opportunity_sensing score. Opportunity Sensing