Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 23

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

Q2019

DriveLiterature

Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book, 'Little House in the Big Woods', in 1932 at the age of 65 — then spent her late sixties and seventies writing the pioneer childhood series that made her one of the century's best-loved authors.

She was no complete beginner — for years she had written a farm column for a Missouri paper — but the books were something new: her frontier childhood of the 1870s and 80s, recalled in her sixties with a clear, warm plainness. Readers sometimes assume a life's defining work must announce itself early. Wilder's waited until most people's careers are ending, and then outlived them all.

Laura Ingalls WilderRead card

Q2020

DriveLiterature

Harry Bernstein wrote for a lifetime and watched roughly forty manuscripts get rejected. Grieving his wife, he wrote 'The Invisible Wall' in his nineties; it was published in 2007, when he was 96, and three more books followed.

The memoir — a Jewish boyhood on a Lancashire street divided by an invisible sectarian wall — sat in a publisher's pile for about a year before anyone read it. Bernstein had begun it at 93, after his wife Ruby's death ended a 67-year marriage, because the nights were unbearable without work. He said his nineties were the most productive years of his life. He died at 101, a debut author for four years.

Harry BernsteinRead card

Q2021

DriveLiterature

Toni Morrison published 'The Bluest Eye' in 1970 at 39, written in the hours before dawn while she edited other people's books by day and raised two sons on her own. In 1993 she became the first Black woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

'Writing before dawn began as a necessity — I had small children,' she later told the Paris Review. The necessity became a ritual: she liked to watch the light arrive with coffee, before the day claimed her. Morrison spent nearly twenty years as a book editor, championing other Black writers, while building one of the great bodies of American fiction in the margins of her own mornings.

Toni MorrisonRead card

Q2022

DriveLiterature

Stephen King crumpled the opening pages of 'Carrie' into the bin. His wife Tabitha fished them out, read them, and told him to keep going. The hardback earned a $2,500 advance — then the paperback rights sold for $400,000.

As King tells it in 'On Writing', he was teaching English and living in a trailer, doubting he could write a teenage girl at all. Tabitha's verdict — you've got something here — kept the book alive. The news of the paperback sale came in a phone call on Mother's Day 1973; King says he sat down on the doorstep, needing to. 'Carrie' appeared in 1974 and the trailer years were over.

Stephen KingRead card

Q2023

DriveLiterature

When no publisher would take his 1935 collection, E. E. Cummings printed it with money from his mother and called it 'No Thanks'. The dedication lists the fourteen publishers who turned it down — typeset in the shape of a funeral urn.

The fourteen names — Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Random House and the rest — descend the page in a neat column that readers have long seen as a little urn, as if the rejections were being given a decent burial. Cummings was already a known poet; the book still could not find a home. He answered with typography instead of bitterness, and the joke outlived every refusal.

E. E. CummingsRead card

Q2024

DriveHistory

After the credit association he chaired collapsed in 1957 and left him nearly penniless, Momofuku Ando spent a year experimenting in a backyard shed in Osaka. In 1958, at 48, he launched the world's first instant ramen.

The breakthrough came from watching his wife fry tempura: flash-frying noodles in hot oil dried them into a block that boiling water could revive in minutes. Chicken Ramen launched on 25 August 1958. Ando wasn't finished — at 61 he invented Cup Noodles after watching Americans break his noodles into paper cups. He worked into his nineties, and Japan has repeatedly voted instant ramen its proudest invention of the twentieth century.

Momofuku AndoRead card

Q2025

DriveHealth

Japanese adventurer Yuichiro Miura summited Everest at 70, at 75, and — after four heart operations, the last just months earlier — once more on 23 May 2013, aged 80 years and 223 days: the oldest person ever to stand on the summit.

Miura had been famous half a century earlier for skiing down Everest's South Col with a parachute for a brake. The 2013 climb was no tidy triumph: he was treated for heart arrhythmia that January, and after the summit he was too spent to walk all the way down, descending the final stage by helicopter — a detail he never hid. He kept a promise made to himself at 65, when he decided old age needed a project.

Yuichiro MiuraRead card

Q2026

DriveHealth

Fauja Singh, a farmer who had never raced, began running marathons at around 89 after losing his wife and son. In 2011, at a reported 100, he completed the Toronto Waterfront Marathon — celebrated worldwide as the first centenarian marathoner.

His age was never officially certified — colonial Punjab kept no birth records, so Guinness could not ratify the runs, and 'reported age' is the honest phrase. What is beyond doubt is the transformation: a grieving man in his late eighties who turned sorrow into training runs through London's Ilford, completed multiple marathons past 90, and became a global emblem of late-life vigour. He died in 2025, reportedly 114, still walking miles each day.

Fauja SinghRead card

Q2027

DriveHistory

Kathrine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon as 'K.V. Switzer' and ran with bib 261. Two miles in, a race official grabbed her, shouting at her to get out; her boyfriend shoulder-blocked him, and she finished the race.

She was the first woman to run Boston with an official number — Bobbi Gibb had run unregistered the year before — and the photographs of official Jock Semple lunging at her became one of sport's defining images. Women were not formally admitted until 1972. Fifty years after that first run, in 2017 and aged 70, Switzer ran Boston again wearing 261, and the organisers retired the number in her honour.

Kathrine SwitzerRead card

Q2028

DriveHistory

Barbara Hillary, a New York nurse who had survived cancer twice, skied the final stretch to the North Pole in 2007 at 75 — and reached the South Pole in 2011 at 79, the first African-American woman on record to stand at both.

Lung cancer surgery in her sixties had cost her about a quarter of her breathing capacity; she took up dog-sledding and photographing polar bears anyway, then decided the poles themselves were the point. She fundraised for years to afford the trips, trained with a personal trainer, and later toured as a speaker telling audiences — especially older women — that the question 'why not?' has fewer good answers than they think. She died in 2019 at 88.

Barbara HillaryRead card

Q2029

DriveScience

Ynés Mexía took her first botany course at 51 and made her first collecting expedition at 55. In the thirteen years she had left, she gathered some 150,000 plant specimens across the Americas — with around 500 species new to science.

She came to the work after years of ill health and two difficult marriages, finding in fieldwork what clinics had failed to give her. She canoed the Amazon, camped alone in the Andes, and out-collected celebrated botanists who had started decades younger; about fifty species now carry her name. When asked about the dangers of travelling solo, she reportedly found the question puzzling — the wilderness, she felt, was the safe part.

Ynés MexíaRead card

Q2030

DriveHealth

Virginia Apgar trained as a surgeon, but in the 1930s her department chair steered women away from the operating theatre. She turned to anaesthesia — and in 1952 devised the Apgar score, the quick newborn check still used around the world.

The score grades a baby's colour, pulse, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing at one and five minutes old — a sixty-second habit that redirected attention to newborns in their most dangerous hour and helped drive infant mortality down. Apgar became Columbia's first female full professor of medicine, and liked to say that nobody, but nobody, was going to stop breathing on her. The detour she never chose became the career that mattered.

Virginia ApgarRead card

Q2031

DriveHealth

In 1960, in her first month at the US drug agency, Frances Oldham Kelsey was handed a routine approval for a sedative called thalidomide. She found the safety data thin and refused — repeatedly, for over a year, under heavy company pressure.

In late 1961 the evidence arrived from Europe: thalidomide, sold there as a sleeping aid and for morning sickness, was causing severe birth defects. Kelsey's stubbornness had largely spared the United States a catastrophe, though trial samples had circulated. President Kennedy honoured her in 1962, the year Congress toughened drug-approval law. Her lesson holds far beyond medicine: sometimes the bravest available action is a patient, well-documented no.

Frances Oldham KelseyRead card

Q2032

DriveMind

From 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, Nise da Silveira refused to administer lobotomy and electroshock, then standard psychiatry. Sidelined into occupational therapy, she opened painting studios for her patients — and their art astonished the world.

The studios opened in September 1946 inside a national psychiatric centre; by 1952 the work had grown into the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, now holding hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures. Carl Jung admired the collection and corresponded with her in the 1950s. Some patients dismissed as unreachable produced work of startling power — evidence, she argued, that the task was never to subdue the mind but to give it a language.

Nise da SilveiraRead card

Q2033

DriveLiterature

José Saramago published a first novel at 24 — then three decades passed before his next. The breakthrough, 'Baltasar and Blimunda', came in 1982 when he was 60. Sixteen years later he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In between came decades as a welder's apprentice's son making his way: metalworker's trade school, years as a proofreader, translator and newspaper editor, and a long stretch — nineteen years — without publishing a book at all. When the novels finally arrived they came in a flood, in his unmistakable river-long sentences. Asked about the late start, he was unbothered: the writer he became, he suggested, simply had not existed earlier.

José SaramagoRead card

Q2034

DriveHistory

Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was crushed by pack ice and sank in 1915. After months camped on drifting floes and an 800-mile open-boat crossing to fetch help, every one of the 28 men survived. In 2022, the wreck was found — almost intact.

The escape remains a masterclass in leadership: ice camps through the polar winter, three lifeboats to Elephant Island, then Shackleton's crossing to South Georgia in the tiny James Caird and a mountain traverse to reach a whaling station; the last men were rescued in August 1916. On 5 March 2022 — a century, to the day, after Shackleton's burial — a search team found Endurance 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea, upright and preserved, her name still bright across the stern.

Endurance expeditionRead card

Q2035

DriveTechnology

During Malawi's 2001–02 famine, 14-year-old William Kamkwamba had to drop out of school. Using diagrams from a library book called 'Using Energy', he built a windmill from a bicycle frame, blue-gum poles and scrapyard parts — and lit his family's house.

The first machine powered four lights and two radios; neighbours queued to charge mobile phones, and later versions pumped water for the family fields. He had read the physics with a dictionary beside him, because the book was in English. The story travelled — a TED stage, a bestselling memoir, a film — but its core stays small and stubborn: a boy, a library card, and wind that had been blowing over the village all along.

William KamkwambaRead card

Q2036

DriveHistory

Shut out of whites-only sports facilities in segregated Georgia, Alice Coachman trained barefoot on dirt roads, jumping over knotted ropes on sticks. At London 1948 she cleared the high-jump bar on her first attempt — the first Black woman to win Olympic gold.

Her winning leap of 1.68 metres set an Olympic record, and King George VI presented the medal. She was the only American woman to take a track-and-field gold at those Games. Historians note the sharper point: her peak years had been lost to the war — the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled — so the barefoot girl from Albany won her gold at the far end of a decade of waiting.

Alice CoachmanRead card

Q2043

StillnessMind

In a set of Stanford experiments, people generated ideas while sitting, then while walking. Walking raised creative output by roughly 60 per cent on average — and it worked even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.

The four experiments covered 176 people and tested divergent thinking — the ability to pour out varied, novel uses and analogies. The blank-wall treadmill result matters: it suggests the legs, not the scenery, do much of the lifting. One caution from the same paper: on focused, single-answer puzzles, walkers did slightly worse. So the old writers' habit sorts itself neatly — walk to find the idea, sit to finish it.

Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014Read card

Q2044

StillnessHistory

The medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had nearly died out: in 1985, the cathedral recorded about 690 arrivals on foot or bicycle. Four decades later, more than half a million pilgrims complete the Camino in a single year.

The numbers count 'compostelas' — certificates issued to those who complete the final stretch — so the true crowd is larger still. The revival began quietly: a village priest waymarking routes with yellow arrows in the 1980s, then European cultural recognition in 1987. Most modern walkers are not conventionally religious; they come for the oldest reasons anyway — to think, to grieve, to decide something, or simply to move at the speed a human life actually runs.

Camino de SantiagoRead card

Q2048

StillnessMind

In a forest kindergarten there are no classrooms at all: children aged three to six spend the day among trees in nearly all weather, learning with mud, sticks, rope and their own judgement. The idea is credited to a Danish mother in the early 1950s.

Ella Flatau's habit of minding neighbourhood children in the woods grew into a movement: Germany officially recognised 'Waldkindergärten' in 1993, unlocking state funding, and by recent counts runs well over 1,500 of them. The Scandinavian shorthand is that there is no bad weather, only bad clothes. Advocates point to balance, risk judgement and calm; the quieter lesson is about trust — small children, handed a real forest, mostly rise to it.

Forest kindergartenRead card

Q2049

StillnessMind

On Japanese railways, drivers and platform staff point at signals, gauges and doors while calling their status aloud — a ritual called shisa kanko. In a railway institute experiment, the habit cut errors on a routine task to about one-sixth.

The gesture looks theatrical to visitors — a white-gloved conductor pointing down an empty platform, announcing 'all clear' to nobody. But the mechanism is sound: pointing forces the eyes to the object, speaking forces the mind to commit, and together they interrupt the autopilot that lets a familiar task slip past unchecked. The figure comes from a laboratory task rather than accident records, so hold it loosely; New York's subway adopted a pointing-only version anyway.

Shisa kankoRead card

Q2058

WonderHistory

Around 520 BC, Darius the Great had the same proclamation carved into a Persian cliff face in three scripts. Millennia later, Henry Rawlinson copied it while dangling from ladders and ropes — and the trilingual text unlocked cuneiform.

The inscription sits dozens of metres up the rock at Bisotun in western Iran, placed for the gods and posterity rather than passing readers. Rawlinson worked on the ledges through the 1830s and 1840s; for the most inaccessible panel, a local Kurdish boy scaled the cliff to press papier-mâché moulds of the signs. Once the Old Persian yielded, the other two scripts followed, and with them whole libraries of Mesopotamia — law codes, epics, shopping lists — began to speak again.

Behistun InscriptionRead card

Q2073

DriveLiterature

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

By 1981 Morrison had already tested the advice on herself. She wrote her first novel, 'The Bluest Eye', in the early mornings before her editing job at Random House, raising two sons alone. She wanted a book about a Black girl taught to hate her own face, and no such book was on the shelf. The line is not really about ambition. It is about absence: notice what is missing, then accept that the gap is your work.

Toni Morrison, speech to the Ohio Arts Council (1981)Read card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.