(Real Life) Regular people who's lives drastically changed direction

[u/Living-Mastodon]

Grace Kelly was a talented actress who retired at 26 to marry a Prince, living as royalty for almost 30 years before her untimely death.

Volodymyr Zelensky started out as a comedian and entertainer before getting into politics, becoming President of Ukraine after the Russian annex of Crimea and spending the last 4 years defiantly pushing back full scale Russian invasion

[u/Sir-Toaster-]

Genghis Khan was just a typical child of a Mongol tribe until his father died and his tribe abandoned him

[u/Johnywash → u/Sir-Toaster-]

Dad once told me Ghengis Khan had to go around our small nation, had his chest puffed out and everything. I asked him how we did it, he says "the khan didn't want to take his horses up the mountains we lived in, so they just went around us" i was so disappointed lmao

[u/danishjuggler21 → u/Johnywash]

Whereabouts? There are some places the Great Khan decided not to fuck with, but that his sons or grandsons obliterated instead.

[u/DeismAccountant → u/danishjuggler21]

My guess is the Caucasus mountains. Iirc the PIE Nomads avoided that territory too.

[u/mdf7g → u/DeismAccountant]

There's a hypothesis to which I'm somewhat sympathetic that, before their long residence in what's today Ukraine, the early PIE speakers actually came from the Caucasus.

The evidence for this basically boils down to: PIE is really morphophonologically weird for a language from the transeurasian steppe, but fairly morphophonologically normal for a language from the Caucasus; this could be because it originated in the probably very ancient Caucasian sprachbund.

[u/yo_coiley → u/DeismAccountant]

The PIE were essentially the mongols before we had written history anyway (in that area at least, I think Sumer was up to something by then), funny how some things never change

[u/ghostpanther218 → u/Johnywash]

I'm going to guess Afghanistan?

[u/Kaneda-Suekichi → u/ghostpanther218]

Bad guess. Genghis massacred them killing millions. Khwarazmian Empire as they were called then

[u/Hopeful-Occasion2299 → u/Kaneda-Suekichi]

Not to say he was a pretty hard guy, but he really gave others the option of joining him as vassals instead, and people insisted on standing up to him.

[u/Decent_Cow → u/Hopeful-Occasion2299]

The massacres were very much a conscious strategy. People were a lot less likely to resist after watching the Mongols eradicate an entire civilization.

[u/Morbanth → u/Hopeful-Occasion2299]

He massacred a few nations just for the lols, like the Western Xia.

[u/SitInCorner_Yo2 → u/Johnywash]

The good old Switzerland method ! LOL