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.
Borrowed ten thousand rupees from his wife to start a software company from a rented flat
The son of a schoolteacher, he worked as a junior engineer and briefly ran a failed company before co-founding Infosys in 1981 with borrowed savings,…
A Persian official who had a dream, gave up wine, and walked seven years to Mecca and Cairo
A Persian court official who abandoned his career after a spiritual crisis, he spent seven years travelling on foot and by caravan through Persia,…
An Iranian lawyer sentenced to 38 years and 148 lashes for defending women who removed their headscarves
She took the cases nobody else would, juveniles on death row and women arrested for protesting the hijab, and has served years in Evin prison for it,…
Born without a right forearm, she has played table tennis at both the Olympics and the Paralympics
A Paralympian at 11 and a Paralympic champion at 15, she went on to compete for Poland at three Olympic Games against able-bodied opponents while…
Lost her leg at 17 and swam in both the Olympics and Paralympics in the same summer
A promising teenage swimmer whose leg was amputated after a road accident, she was back in the pool within months, won 13 Paralympic golds and…
Took her baby in a pram to Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia
One of eight people who sat down on Red Square in August 1968, she founded the underground bulletin that recorded Soviet human rights abuses and was…
The first woman from Africa and the Muslim world to win an Olympic gold medal
A hurdler from Casablanca who won the first women's Olympic 400 metres hurdles in 1984, months after her father's death, and became a minister and…
Faked madness to expose an asylum, then beat Jules Verne's fictional trip around the world
A journalist who had herself committed to an asylum to expose its abuses, then in 1889 raced around the globe alone in seventy-two days, beating a…
Spent 27 years in prison and walked out to lead his country to democracy
Sentenced to life for fighting apartheid, he emerged after 27 years without bitterness and negotiated a peaceful transition to become South Africa’s…
From a Karachi classroom to the team that first heard two black holes collide
A physicist who spent decades on the painstaking engineering of an experiment most people thought would never work. In 2015 it detected gravitational…
A schoolteacher who started her doctorate at 39 and discovered how sex is determined, in a mealworm
It took her nearly twenty years of teaching to save enough to study. In the nine years of research she was given, she found the X and Y chromosomes…
Got 669 children out of Prague in 1939 and told no one for fifty years
A London stockbroker who cancelled a skiing holiday to visit refugee camps near Prague, and spent the months before the war finding British homes for…
The first woman ever to win an Olympic boxing gold medal
A girl from Leeds who started boxing when her mother could not find a babysitter, she waited years for women's boxing to be allowed at the Olympics,…
Given the last rites after a fiery crash, he was back racing six weeks later
A driver who borrowed money against his own life insurance to get into Formula One, survived being trapped in a burning car in 1976, returned within…
Invented the alternating current motor that powers the world and died alone in a hotel room
He arrived in New York almost penniless, dug ditches after falling out with Edison, and designed the AC motors and transformers that made electricity…
Built the world's largest seed bank to end famine and was starved to death in a Soviet prison
He travelled five continents collecting the seeds of every crop humans had bred. Denounced by a charlatan with Stalin's backing, he died of hunger in…
Refused by a classical conservatory, she played bars to survive and became the voice of a movement
A child prodigy who dreamed of being the first Black concert pianist, she was turned down by the Curtis Institute and took a bar job under a false…
Climbed all fourteen of the world's highest mountains in barely six months, a task once thought decades
A former Gurkha and special forces soldier who set out to climb all fourteen of the world's 8,000-metre peaks and did it in just over six months, a…
A teenage single mother who sold yoghurt from a cart before building Kenya's first internet company
She left school after falling pregnant at seventeen and worked a string of small trading ventures before co-founding Wananchi Online in 1999,…
Took blood transfusion to the front lines of Spain and died operating for the Chinese Eighth Route Army
A Canadian surgeon who survived tuberculosis, built a mobile blood service in the Spanish Civil War and went to China in 1938 to train medics and…
An Iowa farm boy who bred wheat in Mexico and is credited with saving more lives than anyone alive
He failed his university entrance exam, spent years in the fields of Mexico crossing wheat by hand, and then argued India and Pakistan into planting…
Had both legs amputated as a child and became a Paralympic long jump world record holder as a teenager
Born with underdeveloped legs and given prosthetic blades through a charity at ten, he won a Paralympic silver medal at 14 and set a long jump world…
His father wanted him to be a doctor; instead he carried six centuries of qawwali to the world
Heir to a family of Sufi devotional singers who was steered away from music, he took over the family troupe in his twenties and became the most…
Wrote before dawn for years while washing dishes and sorting potato chips to pay rent
A shy, dyslexic girl who was told Black women did not write science fiction, she worked menial jobs for a decade while writing at two in the morning,…
