Stories that inspire

Motivation & Personal Growth

Stories about failure, discipline, courage, patience, confidence and starting again.

For teenagers and adults · 11 stories

MotivationBiography

Dancing Again

At sixteen, Sudha Chandran was a rising young classical dancer. Then an accident on the road took her leg. Everyone assumed her dancing days were over. She did not.

3 min readAges 10+1960s–1980s
MotivationBiography

Never Too Late

Anna Mary Moses spent her life on farms, raising a family and doing endless chores. In her late seventies she picked up a paintbrush. The world came to know her as Grandma Moses.

4 min readAges 8+1860s–1960s
MotivationBiography

The Deaf Composer

On a spring evening in Vienna in 1824, a packed theatre heard a new symphony for the first time. The man who wrote it could not hear a single note.

4 min readAges 10+1770s–1820s
MotivationBiography

The Forest Man

As a teenager in Assam, Jadav Payeng found a bare sandbank in the Brahmaputra river, scorched by the sun. He began planting trees on it. Decades later, tigers and elephants walk through his forest.

3 min readAll ages1970s–2010s
MotivationBiography

The Mountain Man

In a poor village in Bihar, a labourer picked up a hammer and a chisel and began to cut a path through a rocky hill. Everyone laughed. He kept going for twenty-two years.

4 min readAges 10+1960s–1980s
MotivationTrue story

The Night Edison's Factory Burned

In December 1914, a fire tore through Thomas Edison's laboratory and factories. He was 67, and much of his life's work was in flames. What he did next is the story.

3 min readAges 12+1910s
MotivationBiography

The Girl Who Was Told She Would Never Walk

As a child, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her leg after polio. At twenty, she became the fastest woman in the world.

3 min readAges 8+1940s–1960s
MotivationTrue story

Twelve Seconds at Kitty Hawk

Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop failed again and again to fly. So they went back to the beginning, built their own wind tunnel and checked everything for themselves.

4 min readAges 9+1900s
MotivationBiography

Born Again on the Mountain

In 2011, Arunima Sinha lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train. Two years later she stood on the summit of Mount Everest.

3 min readAges 12+2010s
MotivationFable & folk tale

The King and the Spider

Defeated, hunted and hiding in a cave, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland was ready to give up. Then he watched a spider try, and fail, and try again.

3 min readAges 8+1300s
MotivationOriginal story

The Day a Rejection Became a New Beginning

Anaya had planned her whole future around one letter. When it said no, she discovered that the door she'd been staring at was not the only one in the room.

4 min readAges 13+