There are people who constantly make me wake up in the morning with a renewed energy to chase my dreams. Because against all odds they usually redefine the world and push the bounds of human achivement and advancement. If we do not emulate them and learn from their lives, we are doing the world and ourselves a serious injustice.

As Napoleon said "Those who have changed the universe have never done it by changing officials, but always by inspiring the people."

Actualising our dreams is the most difficult part of the journey. After having idealised and plotted your path to your dream, the time comes to get your elbows in the mud and go for it.



While many shy away from innovating, working hard and changing the status quo; some people have stopped and faced down their greatest fear which is the fear of the path less travelled.

I am reminded of an old Apple ad that said it so well. So in some way it a good introduction to some of the people who inspire us here at Skewlbuoy.







Pharrell Williams knows it all starts with a beat -- he got his start on the snare drum in his high-school marching band back in Virginia Beach, Virginia. As half of the production duo known as the Neptunes, he has helped everyone from Britney Spears to Justin Timberlake to Madonna to the Hives find time on the charts. Williams also fronts the funk-rock band N.E.R.D., produces a clothing line called Billionaire Boys Club, hawks a line of shoes under the Ice Cream Footwear brand, and designed sunglasses and jewelry for Louis Vuitton. Most recently, Limelight, an updated version of Fame that he created with film director McG, was picked up by ABC. Tapping Williams's own beat, the show is loosely based on his performing-arts experience in high school




Ten years ago, before the iPod and the iPhone became objects of the world's electro-lust, Jonathan Ive sat down with Fast Company to talk about his first Apple blockbuster, the iMac. The machine could not have been a more radical departure from the ubiquitous beige-box PC: a desktop computer in bright candy colors with a see-through shell showing its inner machinery. Bursting onto the scene with all the subtlety of a streaker, the iMac became the top-selling computer in the United States.



J.J. Abrams warps Time at will. Past, present, and future coexist as a kind of fluid that cannot be contained. The camera jumps back and forth in time. Characters age and grow younger again. Time itself accelerates, then slows. "It's intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements in a story," says the Emmy-winning writer-director-producer, referring to Lost, his biggest hit on the small screen. "It engages audience members in a puzzle where they begin to question everything. It makes them look for clues in what they're watching in a way traditional narrative doesn't."


The 42-year-old Japanese game designer is on the fast track: He has created eight Gran Turismo games, attracted a cult following among PlayStation users, and helped Nissan design the technology for its GT-R sports car, which appears in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Kazunori Yamauchi's games are dazzling in their design and striking in their detail, with licensed reproductions of actual cars and a choice of tracks from around the globe. And that real-world car he had a hand in? It was named the 2009 Motor Trend Car of the Year.



You have to admire a guy gutsy enough to build an office building in Paris taller than the Eiffel Tower. By 2012, Thom Mayne's 68-story La Phare ("the Lighthouse") will rise over the La Defense district. The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner is famous for audacious buildings: the bunkerlike Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles that locals call the "Death Star"; the disjointed Cahill Center at Caltech; the mesh-covered science and art center at New York's Cooper Union. The Pritzker jury called him a "product of the turbulent '60s who has carried that rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change into his practice." Mayne, 67, is unabashed. "The age of recalcitrance is over," he said this spring. "The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design." As if he ever did.

Like many young students, June Arunga took time off from law school for a road trip. But it was no spring break. Working with a BBC TV film crew, she traveled 5,000 miles from Cairo to Cape Town, documenting a grueling journey that brought her from war zones, mining towns, and refugee camps to Desmond Tutu's living room. "I wanted to know, Why is Africa so poor?" says the Kenyan, from her current home in Ghana. To visit people displaced after a 30-year war over oil in Sudan, she had to hitch a ride with the relief organization Doctors Without Borders. While she visited with UN peacekeepers, she says, local rebels "threatened to slit my throat and eat my flesh." At the end of her trip, after praying with Tutu in his living room, she bluntly asked the Nobel Prize winner, "Where have Africans gone wrong?"

Hate him or loathe him, Damien Hirst is an artistic and business provocateur. Who else could render a photo of Bill Gates standing in front of his own famous work (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and turn it into a painting that sells for more than half a million dollars? Bill With Shark is a shrewd bit of philosophical and capitalist commentary: the once-voracious, aging Gates catching his own reflection and contemplating the work's title. Of course, the deeper reveal came to the art world when Hirst sold this and other works at Sotheby's last September for nearly $200 million, cutting out the middleman and raising the real possibility of the death of the art dealer



If there's a starchitect who is still shining, it's the Baghdad-born, London-based Zaha Hadid, whose firm's profits were up 400% last year. Hadid, 59, who won the Pritz-ker Prize in 2004, has created astonishing projects around the globe -- from the BMW Central Building in Germany to the Bridge Pavilion in Zaragoza, Spain. This year, she'll finish the dramatic CMA-CGM Tower, which will be the tallest building in Marseille, France. And she's working on the 17,500-seat Aquatics Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, a project that has raised hackles for its cost overruns. Hadid is unrepentant. "In these moments of recession, uplifting the spirit is even more important," she told Britain's Guardian newspaper. "We should learn from things that were done in the past that were done in a hurry."



If it were up to Will Allen, low-income urbanites would be cultivating fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish in community centers, in empty lots, even on their own rooftops. "People don't realize that cities originally produced the food," says Allen, an urban-farming expert who has pioneered a local-farming movement. Rather than bringing people back to the land, Allen's methods of growing food and teaching urban cultivation are transforming the way low-income families can get safe, affordable meals. "Obesity, diabetes, and inadequate nutrition are increasing at an alarming rate, especially for the poor and people of color," he says. He considers it a civil rights issue. "I'm interested in creating a more just food system. How do we get the same food to all people?"

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