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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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."
Not sure which Feynman biography you are alluding to, but if you're talking of his anecdotes - "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", I don't think those are really honest bio. They dont talk about the incredibly hard work that Feynman did in order to become a genius. He worked incredibly hard, for incredibly long. His anecdotes cultivated a profile of a joker and a genius. He was probably both, but he got to the genius part by working extremely hard.
Yes, I've read plenty. At best, they're about personal philosophies, at worst, it's self congratulations and excuses. How many subjects cooperated with a biographer and didn't like the outcome? Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos are two off the top of my head. People don't like that kind of mirror.
Feynman is great and I'll get to Franklin in time. But the way people talk about biographies without distinguishing (like OP) and book stores place them side by side glosses over the wild differences in the two categories.
> No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.
I would argue that no human alive has the self-awareness to write about anything objectively. Does that make all writing useless? Of course not. Same with (auto)biographies. You don't read them (or anything, really) because you think you're going to get an objective account. You read non-fiction for perspectives, points of view, and information you didn't have before. You need to read with a skeptical eye, no matter what you're reading.
Also - you don't read a 'biography' without grasping there will be some bias, and as far as the article's position goes - most people don't read bios to learn how to 'be as successful' as the person in the book. Reading about interesting people is , well, interesting, and it's insight into history.
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!
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."
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
"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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.