The traditional life of Akiva is one of the best known stories in rabbinic literature, and it is a story about beginning late. He is a shepherd in the employ of a wealthy man, unlettered and by his own later report hostile to scholars. The daughter of his employer, Rachel, agrees to marry him on condition that he go and study, and her father disinherits her for it, so that they live in such poverty that she sells her hair.
The moment of decision is placed at a well. He sees a stone hollowed by dripping water and reasons that if something soft can wear away something hard by persistence, then words can wear a way into a mind that has resisted them. He goes to study at forty, stays away twelve years, returns, hears his wife defending the arrangement to a neighbour, and goes back for twelve more. He returns at the head of an enormous body of disciples, and when she pushes through the crowd to reach him he tells them that what is his and what is theirs is hers.
His scholarly achievement is the arrangement of material. The oral traditions had accumulated without order; Akiva sorted them by subject, and the tradition compares him to a labourer who fills his basket with whatever he finds and then sorts it at home. Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah a century later on the structure Akiva had made, which is why an anonymous opinion in it is generally taken to be from his school.