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
MentorMindsAll entries
14 entries
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 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
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 Doreen Valiente: The Witch Who Edited Her Own Religion
Initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven in 1953, she noticed how much of its “ancient” liturgy was borrowed — and rewrote it into the words modern witchcraft still uses.
Meet a Mentorspirituality2 min
Meet Frederick Douglass: Literacy as the Road to Freedom
He was taught the alphabet until it was forbidden as dangerous — and then spent his life proving that the man who forbade it was right.
Meet a Mentorchangemakers2 min
Meet Voltaire: The Man Who Did Not Say It
Europe’s most famous writer for sixty years, and the most misquoted man on this site. What he actually said is better.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy4 min
Meet Helen Keller: The World Rebuilt by Hand
Deaf and blind before she could talk, she learned language at a water pump — then wrote fourteen books, earned a degree, and toured the world. The barriers, she insisted, were never where people thought.
Meet a Mentorchangemakers2 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 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Trust Thyself
He left the pulpit when he could no longer say the words, and spent fifty years teaching America to stop imitating and start trusting its own mind.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy2 min