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
MentorMindsAll entries
9 entries
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 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 Leonardo da Vinci: The Notebooks of a Man Who Could Not Stop Looking
He finished remarkably little and left about seven thousand pages of notes — written backwards — on everything from bird flight to the muscles of the human face.
Meet a Mentorcreativity2 min
Meet Benjamin Franklin: The Man Who Invented the Self-Improvement Club
A runaway printer’s apprentice who founded a library, a fire company and a university — and refused to patent a single one of his inventions.
Meet a Mentorleadership3 min
Meet Hildegard of Bingen: The Abbess Who Did Everything
Composer, physician, theologian, correspondent of emperors — and she began her real work at 42, after decades of keeping her visions secret.
Meet a Mentorcreativity2 min
Meet Emily Dickinson: The Vast Interior
She published almost nothing, saw almost no one, and left behind nearly eighteen hundred poems that changed literature. The small room was the whole point.
Meet a Mentorwriters2 min
Meet Virginia Woolf: The Architect of the Inner Life
She named the two things every creator actually needs — money and a room with a lock — and then remade the novel from the inside out.
Meet a Mentorwriters2 min
Meet William Shakespeare: The Human Inventory
Thirty-seven plays, every human type, and half the phrases you said this week.
Meet a Mentorwriting1 min