why science is never boring

My work with The Amazing People Club has given me an amazing insight into the history of our world.  Thanks to all of my research, I know so much more about some of the amazing people who have helped to shape our world, in ways that I never imagined prior to reading their stories.

It’s not just the achievements, not just the highlights of these lives that are important.  It’s the life that is being led.  To truly understand something, anything, you have to know where you’ve been and where you want to go.  Only then do you know where you are.

So many of the people in the latest book I worked on,  Amazing Scientists, are names that we know of, names that sit in the periphery of our lives as important.  Joseph Banks, Aristotle, Alessandro Volta, Louis Pasteur.  Knowing of these amazing people and their achievements is very different to knowing their stories.  Understanding what obstacles they overcame to be able to influence and educate so widely is what makes their stories so interesting, so much more than just text-book knowledge.

However, sometimes the stories raise more questions for me than they answer.  We can never truly know what happened, why people reacted the way they did or why one simple event set off a chain reaction and took a person into a new direction.  Sometimes, I do think as intellectually as that.

Some other times, I just think that there’s a good bit of gossip hiding behind the story that would make everything far more interesting…

season 1 book releases

I do believe that finally, finally, my work for the Amazing People Club for this season is done!  Amazing Entrepreneurs, check.  Amazing Careers, check.  Now all that is left to do is wait for the fabulous team that I work with to put the finishing touches to everything, and send it away to be published.  What an amazing experience this has been!

Our deadline has hit us with a venegeance (where did all that time go?), and I really feel for everybody finishing up.  In my view, finding out about the facts and writing it down is the easy part.  I have immense respect for the lovely ladies in England and America who are proofing my work and then uploading it to the database, ready to be PDF-ed (what a great technical term).

So this season, HBG are releasing:

• Amazing Americans
• Amazing Women
• Amazing People of London
• Amazing People of New York
• Amazing Entrepreneurs
• Amazing Careers
• Amazing Love Stories

Some of what I learned from these books continues to astound me, as does what I have learned from the production process.  My general knowledge database has grown exponentially in the last three months!  And I’m sure it will continue to grow, as we are planning to start on the second season books straight away.  I’m going to start with Amazing Scientists, and then have a look at Amazing Engineers, or maybe Amazing Aviators.  Let me know which one interests you more!  I will keep you posted on all of the developments for both seasons over the next few weeks.

As always, have a look at the My Amazing People website for heaps of stories and information.

quote of the day

I came across this fantastic quote from Leonardo da Vinci today whilst doing some writing for the Amazing People Club:

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.  They went out and happened to things.

It’s not a new concept by any means.  Successful people attribute their success to going out and seizing the moment.  I just like how da Vinci articulated it: don’t just seize the moment.  Be the moment, the something that happens.  Start the momentum, initiate the action, react to a situation.  Be not idle, and amazing things will occur.  Nobody got anywhere by sitting at home doing nothing.  Accomplish something and dream big – while you’re going for it, just might as well go as far as you can!

Da Vinci is featuring in the Amazing Careers book, which I am working on with the author.  For more information, have a look at his website, My Amazing People.

the colombus of outer space

It’s getting really close to our deadline with Hachette Book Group for the Amazing People Club, and things are finally starting to come together nicely. One of my favourite stories for the last week was on Yuri Gagarin.  I had always known that he was the first man in space – that was just a fact that I knew, and that most people know.  But I didn’t know how he got there.  I didn’t know his family had been torn apart by the Nazi’s in World War II, or that he married his childhood sweetheart on the day that he graduated from Pilot School.  He worked so hard to follow his dream, and was rewarded with one of the most exciting adventures a human can have - space travel.  The USSR declared him a national hero whilst he was in orbit, and he was awarded honour after honour after his return to Earth.

< image copyright Colin Burgess via ispyspace >

It was only many decades later that the world learned Gagarin’s re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere nearly went disastrously wrong.  The descent module that was supposed to release could not do so due to a faulty cable.  Eventually the cable burned through, and hatch released.  Yuri landed safely that time.  10 years later, he was not so lucky and lost his life in a plane crash.  His amazing life had come to a tragic finish at the young age of 37.  However, his legacy lived on, and children of all ages and nationalities have been inspired by Gagarin’s adventure to follow their dreams and create their own adventure.  I hope his story inspires some of you to do the same…

As always, there are more stories and information on lots of amazing people at the My Amazing People website.

hbg press release

Hachette Book Group have issued a press release about their plan to distribute the books and audios for the Amazing People Club!  You can see it all on their site here.

First up: Amazing Americans, Amazing Women, Amazing People of New York, Amazing People of London, Amazing Love Stories, Amazing Entrepreneurs and Amazing Careers!

flying high

The Amazing People Club have officially signed a contract with Hachette Book Group to distribute our series.  Hooray!  This means that in April, we will be releasing the first of many books and audios about the lives of amazing people.

One of my favourite pieces that I’ve worked on over the last two weeks was the Bioview® and career notes for Jacqueline Auriol.  She is regarded as France’s finest aviatrice (female aviator).  She followed her passion for flying till the end – her autobiography is even titled I Live to Fly.  Being the daughter-in-law of the French President meant many disapproved of her lifestyle, but she did not allow their scepticism to triumph over her dreams.  She survived personal tragedy when she was injured in a crash and required 22 surgeries to her face.  Ironically though, Auriol was a passenger on that flight, not the pilot.

< image thanks to Bettmann and Corbis at smithsonianmag >

Auriol set record after record in her life.  She broke through the sound barrier several times; qualified as one of the first female test pilots in France; was awarded the Harmon International Trophy four times; and was one of the first to pilot a Concorde.  Not once did she give in to circumstance or popular opinion.  She gained her helicopter license in between surgeries in the USA.  Thanks to her courage and determination, thousands of young women realised that their potential was limitless, and that they could achieve anything they set their minds to.

As always, remember to check out the My Amazing People blog for more information and updates!

high risk investment strategies and napoleon

Getting to the end of any project means that there are always a few loose ends that weren’t expected.  The Amazing Entrepreneurs book for My Amazing People is getting there, getting there!  We’ve decided to add two more people to the book in order to round out the number to 30 – nice and neat.

One of the people we added is a gentleman by the name of Mayer Rothschild.  He was a prominent investment banker in the late 1700s.  He dealt with many rich and famous clients, but also had to account for the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte coming to power in Europe.  Learning about his strategies and goals was incredibly interesting.  The interplay between business and politics remains much the same today as in Rothschild’s era, and the basic tenents of investing (higher return = higher risk) also have not changed. 

That’s what I find so interesting about this project – it’s fascinating to look back through history; to see what we’ve learned and how we’ve grown, and also to see what mistakes we’ve constantly repeated.  In Rothschild’s case, his father sent him out to be trained as a banker, in the hope that Rothschild would not face persecution as a minority Jew.  One only has to look at WWII to recognise that we haven’t really come all that far since then…

I hope that when the books and audios get published (April baby!) and people start to read and listen to the stories, some of the more unknown and overlooked histories of our world will gain the prominence and recognition they deserve.

quote of the day

The following quote is from Walt Disney – a man who’s success in life can be attributed to his complete determination to never quit, even when it appeared that failure was inevitable.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths

This is a quote that really spoke to me – the world keeps moving forward only because we are curious to learn more, see more and do more.  Disney is one of the many people appearing in the Amazing Entrepreneurs book, out in 2010.  See the MyAmazingPeople site here.

war and limes

My boss over at MyAmazingPeople wrote an article about a Dr. James Lind.  He was a doctor in the 18th century, who researched the causes of scurvy in seamen.  He discovered that the inclusion of citrus fruits in the mens’ diets helped to solve the problem, which we all know now, only it was 40 years before the British Navy implemented his recommendations!  Thousands of men died as a result – more men died of scurvy than because of combat.  You can read the full story here.  My favourite part explained why Englishmen are called limeys – I’ve always wondered…

amazing entrepreneurs

I have finally finished all of the career notes for the Amazing Entrepreneurs book!  Hooray!  That William Cubitt, he’s pretty sneaky given he’s been dead for well over 150 years.  But I finally managed to work out who I was talking about, and write it down.  That doesn’t really sound like a good thing, I know, but having two William Cubitt’s born in the same place around the same time makes life very difficult.

The book won’t be published for awhile, as the distributor wants to start with some of the earlier books, so I thought I’d give a bit of a sneak peek at who is in the book and what they did.  Cubitt I’ve spoken about before, as I have with Beulah Henry and Guglielmo Marconi.  But did you know that the first commercially successful refrigerator was created here in Australia?  By a man named James Harrison.   His family are trying to build a museum in his honour in Geelong, SA.  The aviation company Sikorsky is the name of the first man to successfully design and fly a helicopter, Igor Sikorsky.  Sikorsky had this to say about aviation

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation. 

Sikorsky survived all of his test flights, and died at the age of 83!  Andrew Carnegie, for whom the famous Carnegie Hall in New York is named for, was in fact an investor who showed a deep interest in the arts and education.  Given he left formal education before he was a teenager, I found it inspiring that he recognised the importance of education both then and now.  Jesse Boot took over his parent’s company after leaving formal education at the age of 13, and turned the business into the successful, global company that it is today – Boots Pharmacies.

What struck me about all of the people I wrote about is not that they invented something great – which some did – but that they were determined to be the best.  Every single person in the book was presented with a variety of different opportunities, and what sets them apart from others is that they took those opportunities and ran with them.  I think that is the key point in success – not always being the first or the most inventive, but seizing chances.  You may never get a second one!