Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
Refused to run on a Sunday, won Olympic gold in a different event, then gave it all up for China
The Scottish sprinter who gave up his best event on principle at the 1924 Olympics and won the 400 metres instead, then spent the rest of his life as…
Lost his sight as a teenager, then became the first blind person to stand on top of Everest
Blind from a genetic condition by age thirteen, he trained for years in mountaineering and in 2001 became the first blind person to summit Mount…
A brilliant biologist no American university would hire, so he did his best work in Europe
Born in Charleston to a widowed mother who taught in a school for Black children, he graduated top of his class at Dartmouth and spent his life…
Lost his ship in Antarctic ice and brought every one of his men home alive
When the Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he led 27 men across ice, open ocean and uncharted mountains over 20 months without losing a…
Mixed face cream on her family’s stove in Queens and sold it salon by salon until Saks said yes
The daughter of Hungarian and Czech immigrants, she spent twenty years selling her uncle’s skin creams in hairdressers before founding her company in…
Learned to paint her mother's walls at ten and was first shown to the wider world at fifty-four
An Ndebele woman who painted house walls with chicken-feather brushes in rural Mpumalanga for decades, she was invited to Paris at 54 and went on to…
Went unbeaten in wheelchair tennis for ten straight years and 470 matches
Paralysed by a spinal haemorrhage at six after a swimming lesson, she became world number one in wheelchair tennis and did not lose a singles match…
Began painting in her thirties, was ignored for fifty years and became an art-world star at eighty-seven
A philosophy teacher and poet who began painting in her thirties as a way of refusing to write in the language of colonisers, she was over 85 when a…
Built a brewery empire in northern Mexico, then funded a university to keep young engineers at home
He expanded his family's Monterrey brewery into a wide industrial group, then founded a private technical university to train Mexican engineers…
Showed in 1856 that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun, and was forgotten for 150 years
An amateur scientist and women's rights campaigner who put gases in glass jars in the sun and drew the right conclusion about the atmosphere. A man…
Ran the only working hospital in a war zone for two decades, alone when he had to
A South Sudanese surgeon who left a stable job in Egypt to treat the wounded of Sudan's civil wars, rebuilding his hospital each time it was bombed…
Turned away by the stock exchange for being a woman, she built the first computerised word processor
A furrier's daughter from the Bronx who studied physics at night, she designed one of the first airline reservation systems and then, in 1969,…
Profoundly deaf since 12, she became the world’s first full-time solo percussionist
A farmer’s daughter from Aberdeenshire who lost her hearing as a child, she learned to feel music through her body and built a career that did not…
Spent forty years travelling the Ottoman world and wrote it all down in ten enormous volumes
An Ottoman traveller who spent roughly forty years crossing the empire and beyond, from Vienna to Cairo, recording customs, buildings and gossip in a…
Started a courier business in Amman with three staff and built the Arab world's first Nasdaq company
He founded Aramex in Jordan in 1982 as a tiny express delivery agent, building it over two decades into a major logistics company and, along the way,…
The printer's daughter who became the voice of Lebanon and refused to sing for either side in its civil war
Born poor in Beirut and discovered singing at school, she became the most loved singer in the Arab world, then spent fifteen years of civil war…
Left a senior banking career at 50 to start a beauty business from a spare room
After more than two decades in investment banking, she gave up a stable, well paid career in her fifties to found Nykaa, an online beauty retailer…
A hairdresser from Milton Keynes who became the first woman to win a match at the darts world championship
A single mother who was abused online over an illness that changed her face, she walked onto the Alexandra Palace stage in 2019 and beat two men to…
A Mississippi sharecropper who was beaten in jail for trying to vote and told the nation about it
The youngest of twenty children, she picked cotton from the age of six and did not know she had the right to vote until she was 44. Trying to use it…
A 30-year-old mother of two told to stay at home, she won four golds at the 1948 Olympics
Her best years were swallowed by the war and critics said she was too old and should be looking after her children. In London in 1948 she won every…
Wrote banking software used across West Africa after being written off at school for cerebral palsy
Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a baby and misdiagnosed for years afterward, she taught herself to code, co-founded a Ghanaian software company, and…
Volunteered for the leprosy settlement on Molokai and died there of the disease
A Belgian farm boy turned priest who went in 1873 to the leprosy colony at Kalaupapa in Hawaii, where he built houses and coffins, dressed wounds and…
A monk in his sixties who walked to India for scripture and sailed home the long way round
Already an old man by the standards of his time, he crossed deserts and mountains on foot to reach India in search of Buddhist texts, then returned…
A Shell executive who sold his London flat after a cyclone and built the world’s largest NGO
After the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 war of independence, he gave up a corporate career to help refugees rebuild one district. BRAC now reaches over…
