Inspiring Facts

In 2006, the CEO of Whole Foods reduced his salary to $1 a year, donated his entire portfolio to charity, and set up a $100,000 fund for staff facing personal problems.

The inventor of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, started at Nintendo as an assembly line maintenance worker fixing machines before being discovered by the company president and becoming one of gaming's most influential designers.

At 17 years old, an Indian man named Jadav Payeng started planting trees on a barren sandbar. At age 47, he lives in his own 1360 acre forest which now houses rhinos, tigers, deer, apes and elephants.

(Former) Billionaire Chuck Feeney gave away over 99% of his multi-billion dollar fortune to philanthropic endeavors, such as helping underprivileged kids go to college. He is now worth a few million dollars.

Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees with its profits, having funded over 200 million trees worldwide since 2009.

The LifeStraw is a portable water filtration device that allows users to drink directly from contaminated water sources, filtering out 99.9999% of bacteria and 99.9% of parasites without electricity, batteries, or moving parts.

Capt. Robert Campbell, a British officer captured during World War I, was granted leave to visit his dying mother on one condition - that he return to captivity. He kept his word and returned, only to try escaping as soon as he returned.

John F. Kennedy rejected his presidential salary of $100,000 a year and donated it to charity instead.

Ricardo Semler took over his father's company at 21, fired 60% of top management on his first day, and handed power to employees. Under his radical approach—letting workers set their own salaries and hours—Semco grew from $4 million to over $200 million in annual revenue.

A blind American man taught himself to navigate using echolocation. His hobbies include hiking and mountain-biking, and he has now trained over 500 students in his ‘tongue-click’ technique.

During an interview when Adele was asked about her weight and figure, she replied “I don’t make music for eyes. I make music for ears”.

Theodore Roosevelt read at least one book every day.

In 1918, a homing pigeon saved over 190 American soldiers by delivering a message to nearby support despite having been shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood, and with a leg hanging on by just a tendon.

Karl Pillemer, a professor, performed a study on thousands of elderly people and what advice they had about life. On happiness, there was a consensus: “the elders viewed happiness as a choice, not the result of how life treats you.”

A man with locked-in syndrome, named Jean-Dominique Bauby, wrote an entire book by blinking his left eyelid.

Shakira has been making music for over 35 years, can play guitar, drums, percussion, and harmonica, speaks at least 5 languages fluently (Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, and French), founded the Pies Descalzos Foundation in 1997, and has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2003.

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, is dyslexic.

A full-time cashier at Costco makes about $60,000 annually. The average wage at Costco is over $29 per hour, and the company provides benefits to the vast majority of its employees.

Korean Okhwan Yoon left behind a profitable business to cycle the world in aid of world peace. For over 9 years, he has biked across 192 countries on six continents, and has survived 6 car accidents, malaria, extreme temperatures, robbery, and kidnapping.

The first female self-made millionaire in America was a black woman.

The Beatles wrote into their contracts for American concerts that they would not play in front of segregated audiences.

At 15 years old, Jack Andraka won the top prize at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing a concept for an early pancreatic cancer detection test using carbon nanotubes. His preliminary results suggested the sensor could potentially be faster and cheaper than existing methods, though the test has never been validated in clinical trials or brought to market.

Seattle's Beacon Food Forest, which opened in 2012, spans seven acres and is filled with hundreds of edible plants including fruit trees, berry bushes, vegetables, and herbs. It's free and open to anyone who wants to harvest food, making it the first public food forest in an urban area in the United States.

In Iceland, 100% of domestically produced electricity comes from renewable energy.