33-year-old Cai Yanqiu has spent the last three years of his life traveling through his home country in China with the sole purpose of helping homeless people in any way he can.

Cai Yanqiu’s decided to dedicate his life to helping homeless people three years ago. He had set up a small stall in Zhanjiang, China’s Guangdong, and he was waiting for customers when he saw a barefooted homeless man pass him by. That man reminded him of the devastation caused by the loss of his brother, over two decades ago. In 1994, Cai’s brother who suffered from epilepsy, disappeared from the family home, and when he was finally found, 3 days later, he was in such a bad condition that he passed away in his family’s arms. Cai remembered his mother lying in bed for days morning the loss of his brother, and after doing some crying of his own after seeing the homeless man, he decided that he couldn’t just stand by and allow other families to go through what his did.

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Many children dream of becoming entrepreneurs when they grow up, but very few start as early as, Jose Adolfo Quisocala Condori, a Peruvian boy who started a children’s savings bank when he was only 7 years old. Today, his bank serves over 2,000 clients and offers various financial services.

Jose got the idea for a children’s savings bank six years ago, after noticing that many of his peers were spending their money on sweets and toys, instead of saving it for more meaningful purchases. Despite his young age, he understood that saving money and accessing the financial system were two ways that adults – like his parents – solved many of their financial and social problems, so he decided to make them available to kids as well. He then started thinking of ways that children could generate money without the help of their parents, and recycling seemed like the obvious answer. Jose was sure that he was on to something, but when he pitched his idea for a children’s bank to his teachers, he was told that a 7-year-old couldn’t handle such a project. But he proved them all wrong.

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A 6-year-old girl from China’s Ningxia autonomous region managed to melt the hearts of millions with her dedication to her disabled father who she has been taking care of ever since her mother left them.

Tian Haicheng, a 38-year-old man from Haiyuan County, in Ningxia, had his entire world turned upside down four years ago, when he was involved in a serious car accident. He lost his ability to walk, and was left with use of arms, which made him unable to work and support his family. His wife took their son and abandoned him and their 6-year-old daughter. But instead of Tian having to somehow take care of his girl, she was the one who took up most of the responsibilities, including cooking, cleaning, and making sure that Tian was well taken care of.

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This month, Kyle Messier, a 31-year-old bike mechanic, won the Big Red Gravel Run, a 100 kilometer bike race that takes place in Harrington, Quebec. While this is an impressive achievement on its own, what makes Kyle’s win truly exceptional is that he had already pedaled more than 650 kilometers to the race site, and a few hours after winning he got back on his bike and pedealed back home to Waterloo.

Messier’s journey from Waterloo to Harrington took him 3.5 days to complete. After winning first place in the rural cycling race,he celebrated with some pizza, slept for a few hours in his tent, and then got started on the 3.5-day journey back home. And it gets even more remarkable still; Kyle was not only completely new to bicycle racing, but he also managed to win the 100-kilometer Big Red Gravel Run while suffering from an abscessed tooth.

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Zhong Congrong, a successful businessman from Chongqing, China, has become known as the “the millionaire trash collector,” for his longtime habit of scouring the streets of his city armed with a trash-picking claw and picking up any garbage he finds.

The 52-year-old entrepreneur began cleaning up the streets of Chingqing three years ago, after a family trip to southern China’s Hainan province, for the Chinese New Year. There, he met a retired university professor who had reportedly been picking up trash from one of the local beaches every day, for the last four years. He was so impressed with the woman’s dedication and commitment to trash collecting that he decided to replicate her daily habit in his home city, as soon as he got back from his vacation.

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She may not look like one, but 96-year-old Inge Gingsberg is a rock star. She is the songwriter and lead vocalist of death metal group TritoneKings and is known as “Death-Metal Grandma”.

Inge has had quite a remarkable life. She grew up in Austria, but was forced to flee to Switzerland in the early days of World War 2, to avoid persecution. She spent years in a refugee camp, and after the war, she and her husband relocated to Hollywood, where they had to start their new life from scratch. Inge was able to begin a career in the music industry, composing songs for some of the most popular singers at the time, such as Nat King Cole, Doris Day, and Dean Martin. After a while, Inge started to get tired of Hollywood life, and decided to reinvent herself. Today, she is the vocalist of a death metal band.

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When faced with hardships in their lives, many people find them too challenging and give up, especially on their life dreams. But not for Gabriel Heredia.

Gabriel is a 20-year-old Argentinian barber who was born without hands. Despite his handicap, he was able to grow up happy and independent. He also always had the support of friends and family, never feeling discriminated at all by his schoolmates. In fact, his inspiration for such a line of work was his mother, who is a hairdresser. At the tender age of 14, he started working as a barber, and learned all the techniques to perfecting both haircuts and beard trimmings. Although he first saw it as a hobby, Gabriel quickly determined that this was the profession he wanted to work in.

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When Sven Van de Wege lost his eyesight to cancer at age six, he was afraid he’d never play video games again.

Today, “Blind Warrior Sven” is a competitive gamer who trounces some of the world’s best players at his favorite game “Street Fighter.” Watching Sven use his razor sharp gaming instincts to punish his opponents is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

But what will really blow your mind, is how Sven turned his handicap into an advantage that made him a celebrated professional gamer.

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A 30-year-old woman from California is being hailed as a hero for saving a stranger’s life by donating one of her kidneys to him.

At the start of 2018, Jessica Morris, a 30-year-old dental technician from Orange County, California, set a very special new year resolution – to save someone’s life. A two-hour drive away, in San Francisco, freelance writer David Nachere, also 30, had almost given up hope of finding a kidney donor after suffering from end-stage kidney failure for six and a half years, and was coming to terms with the idea of dying. But he decided to give it one more shot and posted an ad for a kidney on Craiglist. Luckily for him, Jessica was looking for a way to fulfill the promise she had made to herself and contacted him.

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Most octogenarians would consider themselves lucky to be able to not have a hip or back problem, but this 81-year-old Japanese bodybuilder is not only in perfect physical condition, he also looks better than a lot of men a quarter his age.

Toshisuke Kanazawa is living proof that you’re never too old to hit the gym and achieve the body you’ve always dreamed of. A multiple-time champion bodybuilder in his youth, Kanazawa retired at the age of 34 and really let himself go. He stopped exercising completely, started drinking, smoking and eating whatever he craved, when he craved it. He would often look at himself in the mirror and wondered if that was the body of a national bodybuilding champion, but it wasn’t until he was about to turn 50 that he got his motivation to get back on the horse and regain the ripped body of his younger years.

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Albar Tessier, a blind teacher from France, recently arrived in Bolivia to prepare for a grueling challenge – walking 140 kilometers across Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest sand desert, in just seven days.

Tessier, who teaches blind children in his home country, set this personal challenge for himself before losing his vision completely, and has reportedly been training for it for the past couple of years. He wants to show the world that people with disabilities are also capable of performing amazing feats, and to this end he will be travelling alone, guided only by audio GPS, and with an emergency team maintaining a safe distance.

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Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years.

A builder by trade, Levon was drawn to the rock the moment he started hammering away at it with a chisel. His wife Tosya, who now runs his underground temple as a tourist attraction, says that he was motivated by a series of visions and dreams in which a mysterious voice told him to keep digging. It said that Levon was going to create a He listened, and worked a whopping 18 hours a day, every day, for 23 years. At first, progress was slow, as he had to chisel his way through solid black basalt, but a few meters below the surface, he reached softer volcanic stone which made his work much easier.

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Some people would argue that life experience is crucial to being a motivational speaker, but an 11-year-old kid from Pakistan is proving that all you really need is an inspirational speech and confidence.

At just 11 years of age, Hammad Safi has accomplished what most of us won’t be able to do in a lifetime. He is the youngest motivational speaker in Pakistan, and probably the world, a freelancer, TV anchor and a lecturer at the University of Peshawar, where he teaches students twice his age. He has been referred to as a “super kid”, a “child extraordinaire”, “motivational guru” and even “the little genius of Pakistan”, but he hasn’t let the adulation go to his head. Instead he continues to inspire others and push his vision of an educated Pakistan, and access to technology in order to connect the youth to the modern world.

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O’Neal Mahmoud, a 3-year-old from an Arabic-speaking Druze  family in the Golan Heights, Israel, has amazed doctors with his ability to speak English with a British accent without ever having been exposed to the foreign language.

Named after legendary basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, O’Neal Mahmoud didn’t speak at all until he was 2-years-old. Then he started making these unintelligible noises, and at one point started speaking fluent English and using phrases like “my dear” and “oh my goodness”, which are hardly ever used in his home village, near the Druze town of Majdal Shams, in northern Israel. Stranger still is the fact that O’Neal doesn’t actually know the Arabic equivalents of the English words he speaks. A speech therapist and clinical linguist who examined the toddler concluded that his level of English was that of a three-year-old who grew up in an English-speaking family, while his level of Arabic – his native language – was far below that.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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