Meet Jane Austen: Anonymous, and Reading the Room
She published as "A Lady", earned modestly, died at forty-one, and wrote the sharpest surviving account of how money and marriage actually worked.
Meet a Mentorwriters2 min
MentorMindsAll entries
115 entries
Meet Maya Angelou: The Five Silent Years
She stopped speaking at seven and did not speak again for around five years. She spent them reading everything, and became one of the most recognisable voices in America.
Meet a Mentorwriters2 min
Meet Muhammad Ali: The Fighter Who Gave Up His Title to Keep His Word
Olympic champion, three-time heavyweight champion, and a man who lost three and a half years of his prime rather than fight a war he opposed.
Meet a Mentorcourage1 min
Meet Viktor Frankl: The Last of the Human Freedoms
A psychiatrist who survived four camps, lost almost everyone, and built a therapy around the one thing that could not be taken from him.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy2 min
Meet Arthur Ashe: The Champion Who Measured Himself by Service
Barred from his hometown’s best courts as a boy, he won three Grand Slams, fought apartheid, and spent his last year campaigning on AIDS.
Meet a Mentorcourage1 min
Meet Rosalind Franklin: Photograph 51
Her X-ray image of DNA was shown to Watson and Crick without her knowledge. She died at thirty-seven, four years before the Nobel that could not be awarded to her.
Meet a Mentorscience2 min
Meet Ludwig van Beethoven: The Letter He Never Sent
At thirty-one, going deaf, he wrote his brothers a letter explaining why he had considered ending his life. He kept it among his papers and went on to write most of what he is remembered for.
Meet a Mentorcreativity2 min
Meet Jesse Owens: Four Gold Medals, and a Country That Did Not Call
The sharecropper’s son who broke three world records in forty-five minutes, won four golds in Berlin, and came home to race horses for a living.
Meet a Mentorcourage1 min
Meet Florence Nightingale: The Statistician With a Lamp
The lamp is the part everyone remembers. The part that saved lives was a diagram proving that most of the dead were killed by the hospital, not the war.
Meet a Mentorscience2 min
Meet Vince Lombardi: Fifteen Years Waiting, Nine Years Winning
Passed over for head-coaching jobs until he was forty-five, he took a team that had won one game and made it the standard every other franchise is measured against.
Meet a Mentorleadership2 min