There’s a concept in psychology called “nominative determinism”. The idea is that men called “Dennis” are more likely to become dentists, or those with the surname “Lawman” are ever-so-slightly more likely to take up a career in policing or criminal justice. Well, I’m sitting in a fusty corner of a fusty hotel in Oxford, and I’m talking to Dr Brilliant.

If Larry Brilliant was a character in a book, nobody would believe in him. Trained as a doctor, he joined a group of protesting native Americans – “Indians of All Tribes” – on Alcatraz island, acting as midwife as a protestor gave birth to her child. His resulting fame turned into a role in a hippyish movie, Medicine Ball Nation, the movie role turned into enough cash for a cross-continental bus ride from San Francisco to India, the bus ride turned into a fundraising effort for a cyclone in East Pakistan, and so the epic continued. With his wife, he studied yoga in a Himalayan monastery – pretty much everyone did at the time, he deadpans – before, on the instructions of his guru, he joined the effort to eradicate smallpox in India and throughout the world. It was the first and, so far, the only time that a disease in humans has been completely wiped out.

That’s enough for one lifetime, but Brilliant and his wife also founded the Seva foundation, which has restored sight to over two million people. (It was kicked off with a donation of $5000 from a then-unknown Steve Jobs.) He co-founded The Well in the 1980s – the stone-age version of Facebook that pre-dated the world wide web itself – became a dot-com CEO, worked in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Tsunami, won the “TED Prize”, was the first head of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm – not a happy experience, he admits – and now runs the Skoll Global Threats Fund. These days he is probably most famous for his efforts to nip modern-day pandemics in the bud. Who am I trying to kid? He’s most famous for being called Larry Brilliant, and on this particular afternoon he is on particularly charming form.

Officially I’m there to interview Dr Brilliant for a column for the Financial Times about the economics of pandemics. But I can’t help but hijack my own interview for ten minutes to ask him about his career, and about what advice he would give anyone seeking to emulate his astonishing journey through life.

“People should read the Financial Times instead of the Wall Street Journal,” he begins. Flatterer. But then things get more serious.

“You can over-plan things. Some people have ten year plans. I don’t. The best things that ever happened to me, I planned zero of them.”

Should you just hope to be lucky then, or is it about seizing opportunities when they come along?

“A bit of both. But if you just say, ‘I’m going to be lucky,’ you’re not going to get very far.”

Brilliant is warming to his theme, now. “You have to believe that one person can make a difference. I always quote Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’”

Well, it’s easy for Larry Brilliant to say. He’s on first name terms with the Silicon Valley billionaires, he’s a media darling. Of course Larry Brilliant can make a difference, but what about the rest of us? I don’t say this out loud, but the question seems to be on his mind, perhaps because he found fame so early and in such an arbitrary fashion. After Alcatraz, he discovered that the world’s media treated him as though three weeks with native American protestors had made him the world expert on the subject of native American rights and culture. But that media glare was out of proportion to anything he felt he deserved.

“It starts with ordinary people. Ordinary people do extraordinary things, and then we lionise them. We make heroes out of them. And that’s a problem, because it makes other ordinary people look at these heroes and think that they can’t achieve the same things. But that path is open to everybody. Anybody at any time.
“There are so many wonderful people who, if they had the spotlight, their lives would read in the same wonderful way as mine. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about the attention. I mean, I wrote a book about eradicating smallpox, about being the mascot of the eradication effort, and everybody thought it was just me – that I single-handedly wiped smallpox from the face of the earth. But it’s a team sport. There were 180,000 people involved in India alone.”

“Think about Zafar Hussain. He was born in poverty, raised in poverty. He decided to become a sanitary inspector – his job was to test for shit in the water. And he became my translator. He risked his life many times because he realised the campaign to eradicate smallpox was something he could help with, something that he could do. He eradicated smallpox.

“It’s ordinary people who become the heroes.”

Hans Rosling is the darling of the world’s favourite ideas conference, TED. He’s a man who has revolutionised the display of data, who rubs shoulders with Bill Gates, who has nudged and teased the World Bank into opening up its vast development databases.  He’s a professor of public health. He’s worked with Google. He is by some distance the most famous statistical guru in the world. And it all started with coffee.

“My father was a blue collar worker, a coffee roaster,” recalls Rosling. “He used to bring home coins from far away countries, from Guatamala, Brazil, British colonies in Africa. They were coins that coffee pickers or coffee packers had dropped, which had fallen into the coffee and come all the way to Sweden.

“And so I thought that these people were the friends and the colleagues of my father.”

As young Hans grew up he realised that the coffee pickers didn’t rub shoulders with his father. But the emotional connection was still there. His father explained, pointing to the coins, what small wages the coffee workers received. He took Hans to lectures on the international labour movement. “He never travelled, my father, but he always had a big international interest.”

If the emotional lead came from his father, Rosling also credits an unlikely source: the washing machine. In a remarkable TED talk, he recalls the first time his mother got a washing machine, and how much time it saved her, getting electricity to do the work of heating water and scrubbing clothes, work that had taken hours. Because his mother had more time, she had time to read books to him, and to teach herself English. At the end of the presentation, Rosling opens the door of the washing machine and out comes “The Cat in the Hat”. The washing machine, says Rosling, gave him the gift of an early education because it freed his mother from drudgery.

We’re sitting backstage in a theatre in Oxford, in a barren dressing-room, snatching a few minutes to talk before Rosling goes on stage at the Skoll World Forum to give yet another inspiring presentation. (I sit in the audience. The presentation is about demographic change, and Rosling uses everything from stacked walls of toilet rolls to animated computer graphics to make his case. It’s wonderful.)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before the TED talks, his innovative presentational software “Gapminder”, and his campaign for open data from the World Bank and the OECD, came the education of Hans Rosling.

One might expect that a man famous for bringing development data to the world discovered his mission because of what he discovered sitting in front of a spreadsheet or a mortality table. Not true. “I came to understand the world by visiting it. I use statistics to check my understanding and to tell others.”

But how do you “visit” the world? Rosling started young, travelling through Denmark and the UK by bicycle at the age of 15. A year later, having married his school sweetheart (“my family life is very conservative, family values, very ordinary”) he was exploring Greece. He studied medicine and statistics in his home town of Uppsala and at the age of 24 he was taking a year abroad, studying medicine in Bangalore – an experience that opened his eyes to the nature of the assumptions he had been making.

“I saw the lecturer put up a slide for discussion, I thought, ‘that’s kidney cancer, I’ll keep quiet and let the Indian students talk before I explain’. In six minutes, they had exhausted all my knowledge. In those moments I realised the Indian students were better than me. I had always been in the top quarter. In Bangalore, I was bottom quarter. And that was when I realised how racist we all were, how we thought we were better because we had been born in a richer country, with better institutions.”

Rosling qualified as a doctor and moved to Mozambique – “my son Ola went to school on the floor in Mozambique” – where he discovered Konzo, a paralysing disease which he studied for two decades. Eventually, when he moved back to Sweden, he found himself appalled by the ignorance of westerners about progress in “developing countries”.

This is a term Rosling dislikes intensely. This is partly because it sticks – to some organisations, Korea (home of some of the most sophisticated manufacturers in the world) and Singapore (lowest infant mortality in the world) and Qatar (highest GDP per capita in the world) are still developing countries. It’s also because there are tremendous differences, not only between, say, Mali and China, but even between Mali and Ghana.

At one point Hans rails against western ignorance so vehemently that his English starts to break down, “it is not the fact!”, he declares, dismissing the idea that Africa is a basket case. “So stupid!”

Many people make a difference in the world by doing advocacy, campaigning for some cause. Rosling takes pains to distance himself from his. “Everybody wanted to say, “do this, do that”. Nobody took it as their task to describe the world as it was. So that is what I did.”

“We get out information from three places: school, personal experience, and the media,” he continues. “But things change since our teachers were at school or since the textbooks were written. But also, when things change slowly, the media miss them. Iran has a lower number of children per woman than Sweden. Where was the media story about this? It changed too slowly for it ever to be in the news.”

It is a remarkable life, and as he approaches 65, Hans shows no sign whatsoever of slowing down. The twists and turns – from doctor, to researcher, to communicator, to campaigner for open data – are remarkable. I was wondering how to ask about those changes of direction, but as our interview drew to a close, Hans answered my unspoken question.

“I had cancer, testicular cancer, when I was thirty. It helped me to do what I wanted to do in my life.

“I have a motto: it’s never too late to give up. It’s never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realise you love.”

“I’ve had a few labels in my life: juvenile delinquent, maladjusted, crook, coke head, alky, drug dealer and prison reject..” So says Gary Staniforth, another of the fantastic characters who I met recently while making portraits for the Media Trust. I did wonder if I was crazy traveling all the way to Bradford with my then 6 month old son to meet this guy, but it was well worth the nine hour round trip. In recent years Gary has turned his life around in a remarkable way.

Four years ago Gary was homeless, addicted to cocaine and dealing drugs. Gary is very open about the childhood that led him there: a violent, alcoholic father and being taken into care age 8 certainly contributed to his downfall. While in care he was subjected to emotional and physical abuse. He remembers being made to stand outside all night in his pyjamas in the rain, and being jumped on by support workers from table height. This horrific treatment unsurprisingly made the adult Gary angry and unwilling to trust.

Gary had three children of his own, but after 17 years his relationship broke down and he felt he must leave his family home. He stayed on the floors of friends and family for some time but eventually lost his job, partly due to the instability of his living circumstances. In 2008 Gary found himself living in a Salvation Army hostel, unable to spend the time that he wanted with his children, and with no prospect of the situation changing soon. He didn’t qualify for any “high priority” housing lists, and says, like many other single males in the hostel, he felt like the “hidden homeless”.

“I remember wandering around the town centre, feeling isolated and alone, desperate and like my life was over. The pain of being separated from my kids was unbearable. I was angry and frustrated but tired and weak with it all, ready to just give up. I very nearly joined the Salvation Army residents drinking club but knew I had to do something. So, I got myself some cardboard, wrote out some slogans and stood on the City Hall steps in protest in the rain, snow and sleet. I was on my own for 2 days and then a couple more from the hostel joined me. For 3 weeks every day we sat on the City Hall steps collecting signatures and talking to people.”

Gary and his friends collected over 300 signatures and handed them to the council. He wanted to highlight the fact that single males like himself who aren’t in any drug rehabilitation programme, or probation scheme, or on other priority housing list feel forgotten and discriminated against. Gary was asked to speak to the next council meeting and his words received a standing ovation. This was when Gary’s life started to turn around.

After being rehoused, he was asked to contribute to Bradford Council’s homeless core group, and various other service user committees. He’s completed an NVQ with the Chartered Institute of Housing. Gary has led several creative projects with the aim of destigmatising homelessness and providing homeless people with a creative outlet. He helped put together a book called “Forgotten” which was nominated and highly commended at the national charity awards in London 2010. He was also involved in a film called “Hidden Voices” and a billboard campaign around the Bradford District. He is the editor of a magazine and he is now setting up his own social enterprise “The Hidden Homeless”, which will work with homeless people to renovate disused properties around Bradford and bring them back into use.

Gary is infectiously enthusiastic for his projects and the direction his life is taking. “Now I have a few labels I’m proud of,” says Gary, “Active citizen, community learning champion, service user rep, company director, magazine editor and friend.” I bet his kids are proud of him too.