Meet Louis Pasteur: He Treated the Boy Before the Trials Were Finished
He proved microbes cause disease, saved French wine and French silk, and then gambled a child’s life on a rabies vaccine he had not finished testing.
Meet a Mentorscience2 min
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Meet Mozart: The Freelancer Who Was Kicked Out the Door
Six hundred works by thirty-five, and he spent the best years of it broke — because he walked away from a salary to work for himself before anyone else dared.
Meet a Mentorcreativity2 min
Meet Jacques Cousteau: The Man Who Opened the Sea
A naval officer whose car crash sent him into the water, who co-invented scuba, and who spent his later life defending the oceans he had shown the world.
Meet a Mentorexploration1 min
Meet J. S. Bach: A Cantata a Week for a Town That Wanted Someone Else
Leipzig hired him third, after two better-known men turned the job down. He gave them several complete years of new music and died thought of as an organist.
Meet a Mentorcraft3 min
Meet Marco Polo: A Venetian at the Court of Kublai Khan
The merchant’s son whose account of China was dictated in a Genoese prison, annotated by Columbus, and argued over ever since.
Meet a Mentorexploration1 min
Meet Elizabeth I: The Queen Who Refused to Decide
Declared illegitimate, imprisoned in the Tower, excommunicated by a pope who freed her subjects to kill her — and she reigned forty-four years by never settling anything.
Meet a Mentorleadership3 min
Meet Machiavelli: The Republican Who Wrote the Tyrant’s Manual
He served a republic for fourteen years, was tortured by the family that replaced it, and then wrote them a book of advice. It did not work.
Meet a Mentorstrategy2 min
Meet Ibn Battuta: Twenty-Nine Years on the Road
He left Tangier alone at twenty-one to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and came home three decades later having seen most of the known world.
Meet a Mentorexploration1 min
Meet Cleopatra: Everything We Know Comes From Her Enemies
She ruled Egypt for twenty-one years through civil war and two Roman alliances. Then the man who beat her wrote the only account that survived.
Meet a Mentorleadership3 min
Meet Roald Amundsen: The Explorer Who Made Luck Unnecessary
First through the Northwest Passage, first to the South Pole — and convinced that what people call luck is mostly preparation.
Meet a Mentorexploration1 min