2 -Number of times, Honda’s small repair shops were bombed to ashes by Allied Forces.
As a small, unknown inventor during that time, Honda pawned his wife’s jewelry as the capital for his piston ring business only to seen it being destroyed.
Because cement and steel were scarce, he collected discarded gasoline cans from American jet fighters for a new factory. Not long after that, an earthquake destroyed the building.
Despite endless challenges, he pursued his seemingly impossible dreams.
Now, Honda is one of the largest automotive company in the world.
61 -Cliff Young’s age when he won the 875km Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon. (more…)
The whole nation thought he was a crazy old man to undertake an almost impossible feat. Most feared that he would die trying. But this humble old man proved all the critics wrong.
Cliff Young, at 61 years of age, participated in 1983’s Sydney to Melbourne race. Considered to be the world’s toughest race, with the distance of 875 kilometers and took at least 6 to 7 days to finish, Cliff Young entered the race against world-class athletes. Read how he achieved the unthinkable and inspires the whole nation.
When Ms. Tenberken was only 2, her parents learned that she would gradually lose her sight. Recalling those early years, she said she kept banging into things, without knowing why. Before her total blindness, her parents had taken her to museums, traveled extensively and filled her eyes with colors. “I have all my visual images in my head,” she said. By age 13, she was completely blind.
On one trip to Nepal with her mother, Sabriye spent a brief time in Tibet and learned the sad fact about the Tibetan blinds. In this place, the blinds are viewed as having been cursed at birth and are treated like lepers. There were no training facilities for blind children; and if their families were poor, they were left on the street or kept alone in their rooms without any teaching, diversions, or stimulation. Her brief experience in Tibet developed a burning desire in Sabriye to teach Tibet’s blind children that they can have full lives, that they do not need to be ashamed or handicapped and that they can live to the fullest like her.
In 1974, Muhamad Yunus was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in southern Bangladesh, when his country experienced a terrible famine in which thousands starved to death.
“We tried to ignore it,” he says. “But then skeleton-like people began showing up in the capital, Dhaka. Soon the trickle became a flood. Hungry people were everywhere. Often they sat so still that one could not be sure whether they were alive or dead. They all looked alike: men, women, children. Old people looked like children, and children looked like old people.
Ashamed of not being able to do anything by teaching economics, he said, ” I needed to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.”
W Mitchell was 28 years old when it happened. He was traveling along a highway on his new motorbike when something caught his eyes. And when looked back in the direction in which he was traveling, the laundry truck in front of him suddenly came to a stop.
The bike went down, crushing his elbow and pelvis. The gas cap popped off; fuels was ignited by the heat of the engine and the next thing he remembered he was in a hospital, with three-quarter of his body covered by terrible third degree burn.
When he arrived, doctors were not sure if he would be alive. He was judged to have little chance of recovery and his face had been burned beyond recognition.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.
Steve Wozniak, Apple