When former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi arrived in the United States in the late 1970s from her hometown of Chennai to study graduate-level management at Yale University, she was, by her own description, a “misfit” from India. Rather than adjusting to the rhythms of college nightlife, she worked the midnight-to-5 a.m. shift as a dormitory receptionist before heading to class each morning—doing whatever it took to pay for her degree.

Her account, shared decades later, offers a window into the early sacrifices behind a career that would make her one of the most prominent women in American business.

“We worked our tail off because to us, we didn’t come there for the social life—we came there to study and to work hard and to move ahead,” Nooyi recalled in a July interview with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, reflecting on her experience and that of her fellow classmates from developing countries.

“So the goal we had was very, very clear: study, work hard, get great grades, and somehow land a job,” she added. “That’s all the objective was at that time.”

Paying for an Ivy League degree was not easy, either. At the time, annual tuition was equivalent to roughly $20,000 in today’s dollars—a far cry from the six-figure tuition costs of today—and her parents told her they could not help her out financially. Eventually, though, that relentless work ethic inside and outside the classroom paid off.

“When we got consulting jobs or investment banking jobs, people looked at us and said, ‘Hey, these are brainiacs,’” Nooyi said. “Respect just went up—purely because of the hard work and all the efforts we put in… People realized that this was a grueling experience for us, and they respected us for that.”

Looking back, the overnight shifts and long hours were part of a larger belief she held as an immigrant: success was not guaranteed in America, but opportunity was.

“I remember back in the old days people would say they thought the streets might be paved with gold,” she said. “Maybe they weren’t paved with gold, but they were paved with the possibility of ambition.”

Today, decades after those overnight shifts, Nooyi holds more than a dozen honorary degrees—including from NYU, Duke, and Yale—and sits on the boards of Amazon, Honeywell, and Philips. Her net worth is estimated at roughly $340 million, according to Forbes.

From Yale to the Corner Office at PepsiCo

After graduating from Yale in 1980 with a degree in public and private management—a program at what is now the Yale School of Management that predates the school’s MBA—Nooyi began working her way up the corporate ladder. She held various management and strategy positions at companies including Johnson & Johnson, Boston Consulting Group, and Motorola before landing at PepsiCo in 1994. By 2001, she was named chief financial officer, and by 2006, chief executive.

At the time, women led only about 2% of Fortune 500 companies, and Nooyi faced an uphill battle against those questioning whether she was up for the challenge.

But she largely proved her naysayers wrong. During her tenure, which lasted until 2018, sales grew 80%, and Fortune named her the most powerful woman in business five years in a row.

Despite her accomplishments, Nooyi said leadership was not an innate gift but a skill developed over decades of observation, practice, and experience.

“Leadership requires you to have people wanting to follow you—wanting to follow you with passion, wanting to follow you until you fall off the edge of the earth,” she told Rice. “If you can evoke that kind of passion in people, then you’re a real leader.”

The journey of climbing the ladder and becoming a respected manager, she added, is akin to training for elite competition.

“It’s a lifelong process,” she said. “You have to watch, experience, practice, be put in situations where you have to follow leaders, and then you have to have people follow you. It’s literally like practicing for the Olympics or some sort of sport. Leaders are made through a very tough process, if you want to call it that, over many, many years.”

Nooyi’s advice for aspiring leaders is to study those already in the role—and to note their successes, their failures, and the ways they react to both.

“Watch leaders. Follow them. Look at the mistakes they make and how they recover from them. Look at how they shape agendas and make people follow them wherever they go,” said. “Look at all their habits, then learn from that and see how you can become a leader too. Go for it.”

Other Fortune 500 CEOs Who Started in Entry-Level Jobs

Nooyi is not the only Fortune 500 CEO whose path to the corner office began with a modest paycheck. Long before leading some of the world’s largest companies, many executives worked entry-level jobs to help pay for school—experiences they now credit with shaping the way they lead. For many of them, the lessons learned unloading trucks or washing dishes proved as formative as any classroom.

Former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon first joined the retailer as a teenager, unloading trucks at a distribution center during summer breaks. The job was meant to be temporary. Later, while earning his MBA at the University of Tulsa, he returned to Walmart as an assistant manager.

“My first time with Walmart was just to make money during the summertime to help pay my way through school,” McMillon said during a 2017 interview at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. “And I didn’t mean to be there very long at all.”

Instead, he kept volunteering for new opportunities, steadily climbing the ranks while gaining firsthand knowledge of the business from the ground up. He became Walmart’s CEO in 2014 and passed the reins to John Furner in early 2026.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang spent his teenage years working at Denny’s as a dishwasher and busboy. Decades later, he still points to those jobs as reminders that no work is beneath a leader.

“No task is beneath me,” Huang told Stanford students in 2024. “I used to be a dishwasher. I used to clean toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined. And some of them you just can’t unsee.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on July 6, 2026.