David Ben-Gurion was the principal founder and first Prime Minister of Israel, who read the Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv in May 1948 and led the country through its first years. He later withdrew to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert, in deliberate pursuit of the pioneering ideal he had spent his…
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Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876 and founded the company that became AT&T, but his career was broader than that: work on the photophone (transmitting sound on a beam of light), hydrofoils, aeronautics, and the metal detector. The decibel is named after him. His motivation was personal. His mother and his wife were…
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Jiddu Krishnamurti was groomed from childhood by the Theosophical Society to be a world teacher, head of an organization built specifically around him. In 1929, aged 34, he dissolved it in front of its assembled members, returned the funds and property, and declared that truth is a pathless land to which no organization, creed, or…
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Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, worked on the Manhattan Project, invented the diagrams every particle physicist now draws, and cracked the cause of the Challenger disaster by dropping an O-ring seal into iced water on live television. He also played bongos, picked locks, and painted. What makes him essential for…
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Thomas Gordon was an American clinical psychologist, a student of Carl Rogers, who took humanistic therapy out of the consulting room and into the kitchen. In 1962 he launched Parent Effectiveness Training, the first skills-based parenting programme of its kind, later extended to teachers and managers. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace…
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Walter Bradford Cannon was a Harvard physiologist who gave us two of the most load-bearing concepts in all of biology. The first is homeostasis — the term he coined for the body’s active maintenance of a stable internal environment against external change. Temperature, blood glucose, pH, fluid balance: all defended by continuous regulation rather than…
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Siddhartha Gautama — the Buddha — was born into comfort in what is now Nepal and left it at 29 because comfort hadn’t answered anything. After years of extreme asceticism that nearly killed him, he settled on what he called the middle way and, according to tradition, reached awakening under a fig tree at 35.…
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Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, and he did something unsettling with the family insight: he applied psychoanalytic thinking to selling things. He is generally considered the father of public relations — a term he preferred once “propaganda” acquired its stench. His campaigns are case studies in manufactured desire. He pushed cigarettes at women by…
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Friedrich Nietzsche became a professor at 24, retired on health grounds at 34, wrote his major work in bursts of extraordinary productivity while chronically ill, and collapsed into incapacity at 44. He is the most quoted and most misquoted philosopher of the modern era. His project was to ask what happens to meaning once the…
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