Jane accredits much of her influence in life to her mother, who is an internationally known author, Vanne Goodall. Jane recalls her mother once telling her, "Jane if you really want something, and you work hard, take advantage of the opportunities, and never give up, you will somehow find a way.".
Jane was also influenced by her war battered childhood's affect on her imagination. She grew up in England during the Second World War, and escaped the realities of her war-torn world though her imagination. Jane's imagination, as she read books such as Tarzan, The Jungle Book, and Dr. Doolittle, allowed her to turn these books into dreams. By about the age of ten, Jane dreamed of living among animals in Africa. This was an especially unusual aspiration at the time, because girls were not expected to want to go to the "Dark Continent" of Africa.
Jane Goodall was strongly influenced by a prominent anthropologist named Louis Leakey. As a secretarial school graduate, she was working for a documentary film company in England when, in 1957 at the age of twenty-three, she traveled to Kenya to visit an old high school friend. While there, Jane took the opportunity to meet Leakey, who was working at a Kenyan museum. Soon, Jane was working for Leakey with documentation of the behavior of monkeys and the collection of fossils. Leakey, who was yet to become famous for the discovery his wife mostly made of early human remains at the Olduvai Gorge, believed that chimpanzees held much insight into Man's existence. He eventually decided Goodall was the person he had been looking for to study the extraordinary animals.
The chimpanzees" habitat in the East African nation of Tanganyika, now known as Tanzania, is highly rugged and harsh. Many scientists were offended that Louis Leakey believed that someone, who was not only a woman, but had also never been to college, could be successful as a field researcher on such an assignment.