TL;DR—Do you have any theories on how essential is reading biographies of people who are masters of a given skill to mastering that skill yourself? And what qualities or properties of a biography have you identified that make it more/less effective?
I once read an autobiography of Harpo Marx the harpist and mime, so it had the cheeky title of “Harpo Speaks”.[1] It’s entertainment value was not what drew me to it: I was hoping for practical insights into his creative process and pantomime. Was this a wise approach – should one read biographies with the intent of learning practical skills or are they best suited for inspiration?
I don’t mean to dismiss entertainment as a reason for reading a biography, but if you’re not seeking to be entertained, then how effective is reading a biography related to the subject you’re inquiring to going to be? One of the most common reasons for reading a biography is related to the Classical notion of emulation: rhetorician Quintilian wrote about how educating young men with stories of heroes and their virtuous acts would inspire them to imitate or emulate them. That is not the kind of practical skills I mean.
Take for example the subject of investing, figures like Warren Buffet and George Soros are probably the “tip of the tongue” examples for a lot of people and one might be tempted to read a biography about them to learn how to “have the mind of a billionaire investor”. And certainly, even the least technical biography will provide entry level explanations on the topics of Value Investing in the case of Buffett. But wouldn’t you be better served by going to the source and reading Benjamin Graham’s books that inspired Buffett, or even Buffett’s yearly shareholder’s letters rather than a biography?
In the same way, if you wanted to learn about how to avoid Jet Lag, a biography of 4 time world champion pilot Max Verstappen might have some details on how his sleep pattern gets staggered depending on the time-zone difference between one race and the next; but it is probably very inefficient if your intention is to learn about how to avoid jet lag.
My own intuitive devil’s advocate retorts: sure, but if you wanted to learn how to have “the mindset of a winner”—how could you go wrong reading about a prolific world champion like Max Verstappen? And while I think the concept of “mindset” is self-help gobbledegook[2] -- I am torn and confused.
I wonder—when should one read a biography if they want to learn the decision making models and effective habits of “winner”, for example, reading biographies about Max Verstappen, Michael Schumacher, Michael Jordon, Michael Phelps, and Lionel Messi? Maybe this is an entirely different question all together, how much of what constitutes championship winning behavior can be distilled down to decision making models, and explicit habits; and how much of it is an affect or a “vibe” that has certain self-perpetuating qualities? And how much of it is not replicable at all because it relies on the unique circumstances, luck, and resources of unique to those championship winning individuals?[3]
There is also the question of the nature of a biography itself, even if the subject of the biography is appropriate to the skills you want to master (Harpo Marx to pantomime, Warren Buffett to Investment, etc.) different biographies will be marked by different editorial and stylistic choices which may make them less or more effective as research materials. What the authors and editors choose to omit, emphasize, how they present the chronology, even what tone and metaphors they use could all hinder or help the student.
My question is not “can a biography help you excel in a topic?” I would assume that any resource any text if treated as research may have some non-zero insight. I am wondering hierarchically speaking, how much priority should biographies (provided they have the appropriate subject, and editorial and stylistic choices) be given?
For example, if your goal was quite simply to be the guitarist in the best damn Led Zeppelin cover-band ever and therefore to slavishly imitate the guitar playing style of Jimmy Page: how much would be reading a biography of Jimmy Page accelerate or help you achieve that goal in addition to practicing and learning tabs and by-ear every riff and guitar lick and reading Led Zepplin songbooks? A biography of Jimmy Page may include interviews or paraphrases that explain certain decisions about why he structured a song like that, why he was drawn to this guitar or that kind of playing on that track and the underlying thinking. It may also include incidental “world building” references of value, like what kind of amplifier he used – or the fact that most of the records were done on a Telecaster not the Gibson he was often seen playing live in concert.
Then again, how much of that do you really need to read an entire biography for, and how much of that can be gleaned more effectively from other sources? Or is the journey, the narrative itself, even the “vibes” all part of it – and a force multiplier?
- ^
At first the title seems rather ironic, after all a book is not speech (allusions to Geothe’s analogy: “architecture is frozen music”, aside). I am lead to believe Harpo dictated his life story to the ghost writer of the book. So in some sense it was truly a record of a famous mute speaking.
- ^
I am bringing a lot of my baggage to this word because I can’t shake off the impression that “mindset” just a instruction for optimism by another name. This also extends to self-help books prefixed with “Think like a…” “The inner game of…”. How much of any of these can actually be distilled into operational advice that you or I can follow? And how much of it is really just “be more optimistic and you’ll experience a self-fulfilling prophecy”?
- ^
Non-Ergoditcity maybe?
I like Viliam’s comment and think that it largely depends on the biography; consider that one internet rule that says that 90% of everything is crap (more specifically, I don’t think that people are by default skilled or diligent in discerning what the “true” factors in developing skill or success are, including experts, and this discernment is in itself a skill that you need to look for). You have to select for biographies that have the characteristics you want, which naturally takes more work to discriminate. More broadly, I don’t think there is any systematic answer to your question of whether, for a given story, the named factors are true. For a lot of life wisdom, unfortunately, at the base level the applicability of various stories has to filter through a vibes/intuition layer because lives are so different and the world changes so fast.
That aside, I think there is another nice benefit to reading a biography rather than just taking away the list of advice, which is that the human brain likes stories and characters, and that makes the given advice much more vivid/salient and therefore likelier to make a difference in your end behavior.
One famous sort of example in the category of biographies are those written by Robert Caro, for which the author has undoubtedly gone to painstaking lengths to investigate causes extremely thoroughly in a mostly epistemically virtuous way, but he himself would admit that his works have presented information in the framework of a narrative which was assembled by him (he would likely also say that this narrative was “true”). (The alternative is the presentation of a bunch of facts in order, which lack salience without some kind of overarching narrative.)
Finally, I wonder if you really feel that e.g the Inner Game of Tennis really doesn’t have any substantive information (ie, is fundamentally just willing the reader into believing in a self-fulfilling prophecy).
I had a bit of difficulty parsing this parenthetical, so excuse me if I don’t understand but are you saying that understanding what factors or skills are conducive to success is a skill itself that most people lack? And that rather than bothering over which biography to read, I must develop that broader skill?
Do I really feel that? Like I said I’m bringing my own baggage but yes, I do. I am very confident that all the books of the titles I mentioned are reader-fluffers: they make the reader feel good about themselves which more often that not will have self-fulfilling prophecies, but it is not primarily due to any specific instructions, tactics, or decision making models and therefore such effects are not unique to these kinds of books.
I would hazard a guess that for every 100 “Think like a X” or “Mindset” shifting books, maybe 1 would have a useful decision making model to impart.[1]
And between 100 books, a lot of them would all have the same nuggets of advice “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “don’t let your opponent determine the rhythm of a negotiation/sports-game/publicity campaign.”, “Even hollow victories induce the Mathew Effect, so give yourself small victories”, “people who ask more questions are perceived as being better conversational partners...successful salesmen ask more questions” etc. etc.
If you were to read 100 of those books, don’t be surprised if by book no. 45 you start noticing the same nuggets. Like I said, any biography, and any self-help book is bound to have some non-zero amount of insight. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good use of a reader’s time relative to their objectives and other sources of the same insight.
Sorry, yeah, it was badly worded.
Being able to discern what makes someone an expert at X is a skill, Y.
People who are good at X aren’t necessarily good at Y; Y is a separate skill. (- Skill in Y generalizes across different values of X somewhat)
One needs to look for authors that somehow are good at Y; I didn’t specify how you could do this, and maybe there’s not a very good way in general. (But I do like the Caro biographies. But also, maybe I like them for their entertainment value.)
Re: self-help books, I mostly share your position in thinking that ~80% of such books could be a paragraph to a page, ~18% of them could be blog posts of varying length, and only the remaining ~2% have something substantial to say from a pure informational standpoint. (Worse, in many cases, padding the length of a self help book actively makes it worse/less coherent.) Moreover, I agree that of the good-ish 20%, there is a lot of overlap in the prescriptions given, implied or otherwise. I think that even when a book of this type is done “well”, the purpose of most of the text isn’t for it to be of maximum entropy or something in distinguishing world models, but in giving a bunch of perspectives on a small set of ideas in the hopes that one of them sticks particularly well, or the cumulative exposure makes the idea stick with you better. Spaced repetition or other ritualistic behaviors might achieve the same thing, but require more active agency on your part.
I happen to like the inner game of tennis in particular, and feel that its overlap in useful advice with other books in the genre is relatively low, though I might have a hard time defending my taste explicitly.
On that explanation, yes that makes it much clearer. And it’s interesting to reflect on how identifying expertise in a given domain—be it tennis, or comedy, or soccer—may require a specialized skill. A great soccer player may not be very good at identifying what is unique or specific it is about his rival’s training and thinking and approach even if he heaps praise on them and the “grace” of their playing. Obviously, this is where there is a niche for a coach.
On the relative utility on books and padding:
I stress again, that title could be an exception.
Not to put you on the spot, but if you did have to summarize the unique and useful advice in the Inner Game of Tennis what would it be?
I remember many years ago reading a chapter of it and finding a very interesting observation about “Who is doing what to whom?”. the reason that interested me is I’m a armchair comedy nerd, and the exact same expression was used in Jerry Lewis’s book on filmmaking which, I’m paraphrasing here, he described as the closest to a theory about comedy he had. (Even now I can think of a plethora of tenuous analogies).
I can’t remember the chapter in Inner Game… so I’d be interested to hear what your take out from it was.
And yes, spaced repetition by reading across multiple books does sound like a reasonable phenomenon.
I guess that depends on the specific biography. Some books may provide valuable insights into thinking of the person, others may simply list biographical facts.
I would expect most biographies to be of low value from this perspective, because either this is not what the average reader wants, or because the average reader can be satisfied by bullshit.
But I admit I don’t actually read biographies (beyond “Mr. Feynman”, which also wasn’t very useful in this regard). This is just what I would expect.
A wikipedia-style short biography of a person will tell you what they did and accomplished.
A good, critical, book-length biography can help you see, in something more like real-time, what decisions the person made along the way, what constraints they were operating under, how the effects of those decisions looked as they happened (without the benefit of hindsight), and what atmospheric effects contributed to the arc of the person’s life. This is much more personally applicable to you as the reader who has to live your life in real-time.
I enjoy reading biographies of people who made unusual commitments so I can imagine what that sort of pioneer work might have felt like. An extremely weird example (both in the writing style and the subject matter) that has stuck with me is Gabriella Fiori’s biography of Simone Weil (Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography). Another good one is Fiona Joseph’s biography of Beatrice Cadbury (Beatrice: the Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune). Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche was everything I wanted in a Nietzsche bio.