Source from TIME

Jeremy Lin, Salman Khan, Yani Tseng, Asghar Farhadi, Ai-jen Poo, Andrew Lo, Chen Lihua, Xi Jinping, U Thein Sein, Wang Yang, and more.

Yani Tseng at the Met's Taiwan Heritage Night

Jeremy Lin‘s story is a great lesson for kids everywhere because it debunks and defangs so many of the prejudices and stereotypes that unfairly hold children back. He’s dispelled the idea that Asian-American guards somehow couldn’t hack it in the NBA — and that being a world-class athlete on the court is somehow at odds with being an excellent student off the court.

Contrary to what you might read, Jeremy, 23, is no overnight sensation. In fact, he achieved success the old-fashioned way: he earned it. He worked hard and stayed humble. He lives the right way; he plays the right way.

It’s great to see good values rewarded in professional sports because that’s not always the case. Often it’s the bling, the glam, the individual that gets celebrated — not the team and working together to advance a goal bigger than oneself. Jeremy cares only about one thing — winning. And I don’t care whether you are an Asian-American kid, white, black or Hispanic, Jeremy’s story tells you that if you show grit, discipline and integrity, you too can get an opportunity to overcome the odds.

Like a lot of great innovators, Salman Khan didn’t set out to change the world. He was just trying to help his teenage cousin with her algebra from across the country. But from a closet turned office in his Silicon Valley apartment, Sal, 35, has produced an amazing library of online lectures on math, science and a host of other subjects. In the process, he has turned the classroom — and the world of education — on its head.

The aspiration of khanacademy.org is to give every kid a chance at a free, world-class education. The site has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. Practice exercises send students back to the pertinent video when they’re having trouble. And there’s a detailed dashboard for teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms.

Early pilot programs in California classrooms show terrific promise. I’ve used Khan Academy with my kids, and I’m amazed at the breadth of Sal’s subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable. Sal Khan is a true education pioneer. He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable.

Golf is a game of numbers. Success is quantified statistically. On the current landscape of women’s golf, Yani Tseng‘s dominance is unquestionable. At 23, she’s already won a career’s worth of tournaments and prize money. But even more impressive than her win total, scoring average and No. 1 world ranking is the way she wins.

Yani’s infectious smile and genuine enthusiasm for golf create an aura that grabs the attention of galleries and living rooms, captivating even casual sports fans. People know they’re witnessing greatness.

A rare talent with the ability to energize a new generation of LPGA fans, Yani will get even better as she gains experience. Her potential both as a player and as an ambassador for the game is limitless. While there’s no way of knowing how many records she’ll shatter, Yani’s blend of skill, grace and work ethic will be a powerful force on the LPGA tour for years to come.

This winter, while Republican presidential candidates waxed belligerent about Iran’s nuclear policy and Israel warned that it might pre-emptively strike the Islamic Republic, one Iranian waged a countercampaign of international understanding. Asghar Farhadi, 40, is a filmmaker, not a diplomat, and his movie A Separation is no pacifist political tract. Yet as the picture accumulated awards, culminating in the first Oscar (for Best Foreign Language Film) ever won by an Iranian, Farhadi became a de facto spokesman for a besieged people, and his movie the face of a complex modern society.

Detailing the conflict of two Tehran couples — one middle class and secular, the other working class and religious — A Separation is both Iranian and universal. The warring husbands could as easily be an urban American liberal and a rural fundamentalist.

In a land whose hierarchy has punished such bold directors as Jafar Panahi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Farhadi’s success at home could seem an act of craven collaboration. But exile or imprisonment is not a filmmaker’s only badge of honor. Another is speaking prickly truth in pictures, for all the world to see.

Once in a while, there comes along a gifted organizer — think of the radical empathy of Jane Addams or the populist tactics of Cesar Chavez — who knows how to create social change from the bottom up.

Madam Chen Lihua is the most generous person I have ever known — a gracious and humble woman who shares her love of China with the world. Her real estate company, Fu Wah International Group, brought her wealth, but her success comes from her genuine understanding of people, her steadfast dedication to education and the arts and her profound commitment to philanthropy.

In 1999 she established the China Red Sandalwood Museum in Beijing, which is dedicated to preserving the Chinese art of sandalwood carving. One of the most impressive works of art in the museum is a Qingming festival screen. Madam Chen, along with over 1,000 artisans, created this masterpiece with such attention to detail that I was breathless when I first set eyes on it. Madam Chen has generously donated sandalwood artwork to museums around the world, including the Smithsonian.

As an entrepreneur, a diplomat and a patron of the arts, Madam Chen, 71, is unmatched in her willingness to help others fulfill their dreams and aspirations. She is my cherished friend.

Ai-jen Poo, the 38-year-old daughter of pro-democracy immigrants from Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan, has been growing into that role ever since she was a student outraged by the stories of domestic workers, often immigrants or women of color, who labored long hours for low pay as maids, nannies and other household workers.

I met her when her work was recognized by the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was already trusted by thousands of women who had been treated as unskilled and expendable, yet who were responsible for raising children, caring for the ill and elderly and facilitating the daily lives of millions of families.

Ai-jen’s gift for creating worker-led groups and empathetic tactics has made the National Domestic Workers Alliance into an umbrella organization with 35 satellites around the U.S. Thanks to its policy initiatives and lobbying, employment agencies now have to inform employers and workers of their rights, New York State has passed the first-ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (with California following), and President Obama has expanded labor laws to protect 2.5 million home-care workers.

Ai-jen Poo has done this by showing the humanity of a long devalued kind of work. This goes beyond organizing to transforming. As she says, her goal is “peace and justice in the home.”

If Adam Smith had a mind meld with Charles Darwin, Andrew Lo might result. A professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Lo is known for his multidisciplinary approach to finance, using everything from statistical analysis to neuroscience to better understand the markets. One of his most important ideas involves the “adaptive markets” theory.

For a long time, many economists believed in the “rational markets” theory, which posited that all available information was reflected in a stock’s price and investors were rational — and so, therefore, were prices (yeah, right). Lo, 52, believes markets are less like rule-based physics and more like messy biological systems. Market participants aren’t coldly rational creatures but squirmy, evolving species interacting with one another in a primordial sludge of money.

By tracking the data trails left by this Darwinian process, we might be able to get a better picture of how markets really work. The U.S. Treasury buys it; Lo helped set up the new Office of Financial Research, which aims to provide better data and insights about the industry. “Policymakers are always looking for the financial-system equivalent of the MRI,” said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at the launch of the OFR last year. Digging in the financial dirt may be the way to get it.

The past 20 years have been a golden age for China, a time when it built shining cities, lifted millions out of poverty and strutted its stuff as the new century’s anointed superpower. But the China that Xi Jinping, 58, will lead when — if all goes to plan — he becomes China’s President in the fall is also a fretful place. In coming years, its economy will probably not grow at the pace that Chinese have come to expect. And the extraordinary fall of Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary, has shattered the carapace of political stability that the Communist Party has been at such pains to polish since 1989.

Can Xi steer his nation to be less defensive abroad and less dependent on a creaking economic model at home, all while maintaining party rule and a confined political life? Some doubt it. Xi is the modern Chinese establishment personified, the son of a colleague of Mao Zedong’s and the husband of Peng Liyuan, one of China’s best- known singers. But perhaps it is those who know China’s structure best who will be able to find the flexibility to cope with the changes that are surely coming.

After the Chinese village of Wukan revolted against local authorities last year, a crackdown seemed inevitable. Instead, Wang Yang, 57, the Communist Party boss of Guangdong province, approved a new local election and an investigation into villagers’ complaints of corruption. Tipped for promotion this fall, Wang could bring a softer touch to Chinese power.

Since he took office a little more than a year ago, the President of Burma, U Thein Sein, has proved himself the architect of one of the most unlikely democratic transitions anywhere in the world.

It’s been an amazing balancing act. He’s had to keep on board the ex-generals who still dominate government, as well as army chiefs, top businessmen, the opposition parties — including the largest, led by Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi — and a young and dynamic civil society.

U Thein Sein, 67, is trying to perform a triple act of moving toward democratic government, overhauling one of the world’s most backward economies and negotiating an end to over a dozen long-standing ethnic conflicts, all while the country remains under punishing sanctions.

And whether or not he succeeds will be important not just for Burma’s 55 million people but for all of Asia.

Burma was until just recently a byword for almost every early 21st century ill. But if U Thein Sein gets his way, it may soon become a model for peaceful democratic change.

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