
Why I stopped reading biographies - tefo-mohapi
http://tefomohapi.com/post/150912193488/why-i-stopped-reading-biographies
======
blizkreeg
Biographies shouldn't be read as a manual to learn what made those women and
men successful.

Read them as a lesson in understanding people, personalities, traits, follies
and to give an occasional spark to the fire within you. You'll never be able
to replicate success by following what someone else did, but you can almost
always find something inspiring about how they went about doing it.

~~~
DavidWanjiru
And ultimately, remember that the biography is just one person's version of
the story of another human being. You don't necessarily know what was left
out, or left in.

------
pipio21
Most real (good) biographies are not written by the successful person
itself(autobiographies).

In most real biographies you learn a lot about the sacrifices the person had
to do in order to be successful(success meaning getting the outcome they
wanted to get). Most people won't make the sacrifices because they want the
output, but not the way to get there.

You see the Ads? Get slim and strong without effort. That is what people want.

For example, Mother Teresa was successful in helping hundreds of thousands of
people, that was what she wanted, but did tremendous sacrifices for getting
there.

I personally met Vicente Ferrer and talked with him(I was very young and was
shocked for what he told me) when Indian usurers wanted to kill him or at
least exile him from India. He had to renounce Spanish citizenship to continue
his work and was very successful in the end.

My father met Almodovar when other people called him a failure, shouted and
insulted him on the street for making the films he did.

It is only thanks to early aviation pioneers, most of them died in accidents,
that planes fly.

Explorers like Christopher Colombus or Livingstone changed history. But
Livingstone wife died in one of his travels, Colombus became bankrupted
following his dream. He had to give his child in adoption.

Gutenberg spent his entire life perfecting a machine, the printing press, that
only worked well after he had died.

Elon Musk personal life is a drama. But he is hell bent on getting to Mars and
he will get there. Period.

------
cheriot
I stopped reading autobiographies for the same reason. No human alive has the
self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

But non-auto-biographies!! So many history books are the high level "this
happened in that year caused by whatever-just-trust-me" while biographies dig
into how the world actually worked. Especially if they're set in the last few
hundred years and not the last 30, there's a tremendous amount of primary
sources to base the writing without over politicizing the topic. What kind of
history won't have a survivor bias? Is this an excuse to ignore history
entirely?

> I also try to read as many anti-biographies, i.e. people who don’t like the
> subject

That's introducing it's own bias. But you might as well read The Power Broker
if you're going that direction. Fascinating story.

~~~
objectivistbrit
> No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

You and OP make way too much of this. Have you actually read any
autobiographies? As with any piece of writing, you have to form your own
judgements, but people can't completely fabricate their life stories or delude
themselves about the reasons for their success.

Autobiographies I've read, and enjoyed, even though I think the writers are
all in different ways dishonest, include Malcolm X (street gangster turned
religious leader), Gandhi (moralistic prig with weird sexual perversions),
Bertrand Russell (projects saintly calm but had weird bouts of rage) and 50
Cent (claimed he never smoked crack, and it only accidentally ended up in his
bloodstream). Still, I believe all four are accurate when describing the
reasons for their success.

(For more honest auto-biographies, I'd recommend Ben Franklin, Winston
Churchill, and Richard Feynman, off the top of my head).

Either way, no-one writes "I achieved X by doing Y and Z, it was simple", it's
more like "I tried to achieve X by doing A, and that went disastrously, then I
tried B, and made some progress, then I realised X was a waste of time and
went after Y, and noticed most people who wanted Y did Z but that didn't work
for them, so I tried doing C, then D, and then E, and that's when things began
taking off".

~~~
awclives
Of Churchill's work, I found Savrola, a novel he wrote at 24, to be the among
most revealing . . .

"Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the
sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what? A
people's good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the
direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he
was powerless to resist it."

In source:
[https://jupiter.ai/books/awgm/?hl=plV](https://jupiter.ai/books/awgm/?hl=plV)

------
yodsanklai
He seems to reduce biographies to some kind of self-improvement books or life
lessons. Maybe some are marketed as such, but the genre is much more diverse
than that!

------
fsloth
It seems to me this relates to contemporary books that are chosen for self-
mentoring purposes.

There are other sorts of biographies, and other motivations for reading them.

------
taeric
I admit I was fearing a long drawn out answer. This was nice and short.

I think I agree with the point, too. Reading of failures is typically clearer,
because you can sometimes get good answers there. Not always, of course. But
many successes include the hidden, "also, we did not get very unlucky."

~~~
smoyer
On my phone it was nice and short becauze the article had its own non-
functioning scroll bar. Only about one-eighth of the article was actually
visible but it was more than enough to understand his feelings.

------
automatwon
The world might be chaotic and exhibit 'sensitive dependence on initial
conditions' (One year ago, how many people could have predicted the snowball
of Donald Trump's campaign?), but it would be disingenuous to claim that
biographies are complete noise. Even the genre of Fiction, despite its
nomenclature, elicits truths about the world, possibly even _the_ most
profound truths that non-fiction cannot otherwise capture.

Right before coming here, I had just watched 'The End of the Tour', a drama
about a Rolling Stones journalist writing a biography about writer David
Foster Wallace (and now I'm writing about it, how meta is that?). In my
opinion, David Foster Wallace's work is a paragon of fiction eliciting those
profound truths. Ironically enough, one of the themes explored in the film was
about being in-tune versus out-of-touch with reality specifically in the
context of success / fame. I leave you with an excerpt from the film (Spoiler
Alert):

 _All your protesting "I'm just regular guy". You don't crack open a thousand
page book because the author is a regular guy. You do it because he is
brilliant. Because you want him to be brilliant._

------
awclives
Relevant lines from Emerson:

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody's
name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another
day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

In source:
[https://jupiter.ai/books/vKv9/?hl=mAy](https://jupiter.ai/books/vKv9/?hl=mAy)

~~~
SiVal
And I might add, Smart men believe in luck, believe luck is probabilistic, and
believe their actions can significantly alter the probabilities, even if they
can't guarantee an outcome.

------
rweba
I actually LOVE reading biographies, in fact this year I made a special point
of reading as many biographies as I could. And yes, like this guy I read
biographies with the very specific goals of learning life lessons and ideas
that I could implement in my own life.

But I agree with his logic:

(1) He is referring to autobiographies and not biographies. As he points out,
plenty of biographies are critical and even extensively point out all the
subject's flaws and failures.

(2) The value of reading biographies comes from aggregating them not
extrapolating from one. If you read 10 biographies of entrepreneurs and you
notice the same 3 recurring themes in all their stories, that's a good hit
that those themes are not random.

(3) There is definitely a danger of survivor bias, but the best biographies do
a good job of trying to figure how much luck played a role in an individual's
success.

But the bottomline is that no matter what you read, you do have to take it
with a grain of salt and consider that there are probably many other factors
which were not included.

------
davidivadavid
"The answer became clearer, you can work hard, persevere, get degrees, etc.
and still FAIL."

Sure. Does that mean you should not work hard, persevere, get degrees, etc. ?

Because what you learn from biographies is not a 1:1 plan to succeed doesn't
mean you can't learn ways to systematically improve your odds of success
(regardless of the way you define that).

~~~
anotheryou
I'm not too sure about this. I know quite a few artists biographies, here
things often involve being broke in NYC* and some drug abuse. This is the
other extreme, but shows how wrong things could be.

If you know include the costs of the positive examples you quoted one should
give it a second thought: Hard work and degrees do cost time, effort and in
the worst case they trade in happiness. These choices might also cause broken
hearts for those who did everything right and still blame themselves for not
having their dream career. Or even worse: having the dream career and only
than realizing they missed the youth of their kids or something.

* something that's also totally different today, I think there is not much room (especially literally) for the poor in NYC (at least that's what I've been told, never lived there)

------
segmondy
If you have a fire, you gotta stoke it once in a while to keep it burning. For
me, that is what biographies and self motivation/help books are. They are not
the source one one true secret to help you find the way. They are a bit of
fuel to the fire to fuel your motivation and keep you going.

------
pepy
I stopped reading "Why I stopped..." articles

------
lazyant
In Warrant Buffet's biography "the snowball" (in which according to the author
she had freedom in what to write and was directed to highlight the negative as
well) he acknowledges that he won the genetic and country lottery, so there
are biographies and biographies, and it's true that many are hagiographies or
ghost-written and basically made up like "Trump's" The Art of the Deal.

------
labrador
Author doesn't seem to realize that most of us already know that
autobiographies by business types are full of bombast and self-glorification
and are mostly ghost written anyways. I guess I'm glad the author came to this
realization, but I don't know why it needs to be on the front page of HN. For
example, I've never read anyone referencing Trump's Art of the Deal in any
serious way.

------
obj-g
The author conflates biographies with autobiographies, makes strange claims
about the purpose of biographies (to learn how to succeed?) and generally
doesn't have much of interest or clarity to say on the topic. Why this is here
completely baffles me.

------
0x54MUR41
For me, reading biographies is good to find something inspiring what people
did. But, people are different. "Success" has different meaning among
ourselves. People have different path/map that to success. So, find your own
path!

------
Beanus
Not having native scrolling to read an article on the phone is incredibly
annoying...

------
patkai
I will continue to read autobiographies. Every single person on earth is
writing her own autobiography, either on paper on in her head. I am writing my
own and it is greatly entertaining and educational how others go about it.

------
ibloomfield38
Seems you're mostly referring to auto-biographies.

~~~
anotheryou
Especially non auto-biographies will not even be written for the non-
survivors.

------
Tinyyy
Just to clarify, who is Marcelle Reich? Is March Rich a typo? (Marc?) Is the
biography you're referring to the one by Daniel Ammann?

~~~
vonnik
The late Marc Rich was a commodities trader who founded Glencore. He got into
trouble for tax evasion and striking oil deals with Iran during the US hostage
crisis there. Lived as an international fugitive in Switzerland for many
years, surrounded by armed guards. Was pardoned by Bill Clinton.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich)

------
dozzie
For me it would be more interesting why did you start reading them in the
first place.

