Why I stopped reading biographies

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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."

In source: https://jupiter.ai/books/vKv9/?hl=mAy

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.

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).