Let there be more biographies of failures

Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

When I saw the title, I initially rolled my eyes[0], but I have to concede a lot of the points the author is making with regard to the examples he's chosen. There is value in biographies covering failures.

My first thought was "there's no market for it". But yes, there definitely is -- at least, I'm part of it. I remember watching a documentary on covering an early .com failure that with a few tweaks would have been a biography about the failures of the CEO and the tragedy of that experience in his life. It was a very unique failure and it interested me because it was a failure at a level I had not experienced in my life[1].

There is a very similar market in the "failure biography" category: True Crime. I feel it's the closest analog. Outside of the books that are written simply because the crime is so gruesome, many are about particularly clever criminal(s) and the errors that led to their capture[2]. While these books often focus on the whole process, and might center around an investigator's hunt for a criminal, there are plenty where "A Biography of Stabby McMurderFace" would be a better title. I'm sure there's an abstraction and a way to map the successes/failures from a true crime book to adequately apply to non-criminal life. Everything I know about software development says it must be true. /s

[0] There seems to be a growing trend with hating on people who are successful, whether it's entirely dismissing their success as "luck" or pointing out the obvious fact that "reading a Biography will not teach you how to become a multi-millionaire". Or worse, that reading about a successful person's life is a harmful way to use your limited entertainment time (when did it become popular to write articles talking to adults like they've not been on this planet their whole, adult, life? Do we need to be told that wild success is an outlier just because a few adults need instructions to operate Shampoo?).

[1] I won't deny it, I was watching it 80% for the "train-wreck" of it all and only 20% for the cautionary tale aspects, but you consume both.

[2] There is the third, "unsolved", category and I don't know what percentage all of these books represent of the whole, but I'd consider only the "failed criminals" which at-a-glance appears to be the most common.

Same for education. Let students see how many failures and wrong theories occured in the past, even from the smartest brains of their days. And stop forcing godspell like knowledge onto brains. Make them try, think, sweat, imagine, converge or diverge and correct themselves with some guidance to avoid too much confusion.

I find that whenever I post about my failures, my blog gets more comments and readers are just more engaged in general. They can relate to it! There's way too much "look what I can do!" out there. https://miscdotgeek.com/first-qrp-portable-ops-failure/

If you work on things with a 5% chance of success but 1000x potential return, it absolutely makes sense to keep trying if you have the capacity to take on that much risk.