100 Life Simulators

Play as Einstein, Darwin, Curie, Jobs, and 96 more. Make their legendary decisions before seeing what they actually chose.

Albert Einstein

Patent clerk to physicist. Rewrote physics in 12 months.

Had evolution theory in 1838. Didn't publish for 20 years.

First woman Nobel Prize winner. Won it twice.

Fired from Apple. Came back to build the world's most valuable company.

Started with $114. Built the greatest investing track record in history.

Born in poverty. Fired as TV reporter. Became most powerful woman in media.

SpaceX failed 3 times. Tesla nearly bankrupt. Kept going anyway.

27 years in prison. Became president at 75.

Stephen Hawking

Diagnosed with ALS at 21. Rewrote physics anyway.

Vincent van Gogh

Failed at 4 careers. Sold one painting. Left 900 masterpieces.

Won the War of Currents. Died broke in a hotel room.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Child prodigy. Died at 35 with 800 works.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Completely deaf by 44. Wrote the 9th Symphony in silence.

Leonardo da Vinci

7,000 notebook pages. Fewer than 20 finished paintings.

Invented calculus before 26. Sat on it for 20 years.

1,093 patents. Lit up Manhattan. Electrocuted animals to destroy Tesla's tech.

Cocaine advocate. Abandoned theories. Fled Gestapo at 82.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Resigned at 34. Books sold under 100 copies. Collapsed at 44.

Told friend to burn his books. Brod didn't.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Mock execution at 28. Four years in Siberia. Wrote Crime & Punishment in 26 days.

Bus accident at 18. 35 surgeries. 55 self-portraits.

Fired for lacking imagination. Built the most beloved brand on earth.

Rejected by Toyota. Became world's largest engine manufacturer.

Single mother on welfare. Rejected 12 times. Sold 600M books.

Broke repairman. Beat Ducati at World Superbike Championship.

William Shakespeare

Grammar school boy. No university. Wrote 37 plays that defined English.

Galileo Galilei

Proved the Earth moves. Spent his last 9 years under house arrest.

Wrote nothing. Questioned everything. Executed for it.

Attended Socrates' execution. Built the first university.

Student of Plato. Tutor of Alexander the Great. Founded Western logic.

Rejected by every ruler of his time. Became the most quoted man in history.

Eureka moment in the bath. Built war machines that held off Rome.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Put the sun at the center of the universe. Waited until dying to publish.

Lord Byron's daughter. Wrote the first computer algorithm in 1843.

Cracked Enigma. Chemically castrated for being gay. Died at 41.

Charles Babbage

Invented the computer in 1837. Never finished building it.

Michael Faraday

No math education. Invented the electric motor anyway.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

No formal training. Mailed equations to Cambridge. Admitted immediately.

Richard Feynman

Cracked safes at Los Alamos. Won the Nobel Prize. Taught like no one else.

Johannes Kepler

His mother was tried as a witch. He calculated the laws of planetary motion anyway.

Proved infinities have different sizes. Died in a sanatorium.

Évariste Galois

Founded group theory at 20. Died in a duel at 20.

Proved math has limits. Starved himself to death out of paranoia.

Discovered nuclear fission. The Nobel Prize went to her male colleague.

Florence Nightingale

Refused marriage and comfort. Invented modern nursing. Saved thousands in Crimea.

First recorded female mathematician. Murdered by a Christian mob in 415 AD.

Ignaz Semmelweis

Proved doctors were killing patients. Medical establishment ignored him.

Alexander Fleming

Forgot to clean a petri dish. Discovered penicillin by accident.

Built the first calculator at 18. Had a mystical vision at 31. Gave everything away.

René Descartes

"I think, therefore I am." Rebuilt philosophy from scratch in a stove-heated room.

No money, no status, no room of her own. Wrote novels that outlasted everyone.

Charles Dickens

Child factory worker at 12. Wrote 15 novels and changed labor laws.

Count and soldier. Gave his wealth away. Died at a railway station at 82.

Exiled for 19 years. Wrote Les Misérables in exile. Returned to a hero's welcome.

Went bankrupt twice. Became the most quoted American writer.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick sold 3,000 copies. He died unknown. Now it's a masterpiece.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby sold 20,000 copies. He died thinking himself a failure.

No university degree. Manic depression. Changed the novel forever.

Published The Bell Jar under a pseudonym. Died at 30. Recognized as a genius after.

Died at 25. Left the greatest odes in English literature.

Emily Dickinson

Never left home. Only 10 poems published in her lifetime. Left 1,800 more.

Most witty man in London. Jailed for homosexuality. Died in exile.

Agatha Christie

Wrote 66 detective novels. Mysteriously disappeared for 11 days in 1926.

Mother died in childbirth. Wrote Frankenstein at 18 on a dare.

G.K. Chesterton

Enormous man. Tiny wit. Created Father Brown. Debated Shaw for decades.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Created Sherlock Holmes. Spent his later years chasing ghosts.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Pilot and author. Wrote The Little Prince. Vanished on a reconnaissance mission.

Rabindranath Tagore

First non-European Nobel Literature winner. Later rejected his British knighthood.

Painted the Sistine Chapel flat on his back for four years.

147,800 works. Multiple marriages. Redefined what art could be.

Most successful Dutch painter of his era. Went bankrupt anyway.

Quit banking at 35. Abandoned his family. Ran away to Tahiti to paint.

Left his greatest church unfinished. It's been under construction for over 100 years.

Katsushika Hokusai

Changed his name 30 times. Created The Great Wave at age 71.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Moved to the New Mexico desert at 60. Made 2,000 works in isolation.

Poverty and mental illness. Painted The Scream during an anxiety attack.

Painted color fields. Sued a restaurant. Died by suicide at 66.

Camille Claudel

Rodin's student and lover. Committed to an asylum for 30 years.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Orphaned at 10. Wrote 1,000+ works by candlelight. Ignored after death. Rediscovered 100 years later.

Frédéric Chopin

Played piano unlike anyone before or since. Died of tuberculosis at 39.

First rock star. Women fainted at his concerts. Became a priest at 54.

Never heard most of his own works performed. Wrote 600 songs by age 31.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Forced into marriage. Wrote Swan Lake in the depths of depression.

Lived in a tiny room with his cat. Invented ambient music before anyone named it.

Andrew Carnegie

Immigrant steelworker became the world's richest man. Then gave it all away.

Failed twice. Third attempt put the world on wheels.

Benjamin Franklin

Flew a kite in a lightning storm. Shaped American democracy.

Invented dynamite. Horrified by what it did. Left his fortune to create the peace prize.

Raised in an orphanage. Built the most enduring fashion brand in history.

First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Vanished over the Pacific.

Ernest Shackleton

Ship crushed by ice. All 28 men survived anyway.

Jacques Cousteau

Co-invented scuba diving. Explored 70% of the Earth's unknown surface.

Buckminster Fuller

Expelled twice from Harvard. Invented the geodesic dome. Filed 28 patents.

Marcus Aurelius

Roman Emperor who wrote his philosophy in a tent on the battlefield.

Lived in a barrel. Told Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight.

Søren Kierkegaard

Called himself the most miserable man alive. Founded existentialism.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Most pessimistic philosopher in history. Lived happily with his poodle for 27 years.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Gave away his family fortune. Became an elementary school teacher. Changed philosophy twice.

Broke from Freud. Mapped the unconscious. Built a stone tower with his own hands.

Invented modern dance. Wore flowing scarves. Died when one caught in a car wheel.