Let there be more biographies of failures

Check out The Library of Mistakes:

https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/

You might really like this documentary on Netflix called "Losers" [1][2]

"Storyline

In a "winning is everything" society, how do we handle failure? This series profiles athletes who have turned the agony of defeat into human triumph."

[1] https://www.netflix.com/title/80198306

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9817218/

  > So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice.

Both are useful, yes. With no evidence, what-so-ever, my gut is that both are a lot less useful than we give them credit for. My Dad is a success by most of societies measures (and all of my own). A biography of his life couldn't possibly share enough advice to teach someone else to be successful. I could do it pretty easily: Work harder than you are capable of, then harder than that, and do so without a paycheck (but with a very large mortgage) for a few years while still managing to pay your employees. You'll be driving over to your office every 2.5 hours to change paper in your color printer to print paper catalogues (at 2:00 AM, 4:30 AM ...) so you won't be sleeping a lot the first few years, and you'll do so on the family-room floor because getting up and down all night long isn't going to work for Mom.

Meanwhile, once a month or so, have some crisis happen that threatens to shut the place down. Do this for several years until your customers -- all of whom have far less faith in your company continuing to exist (in a space where that's really important) -- are finally willing to send orders big enough your way for you to get any financial benefit from the work you're doing (and give most of it to your tireless staff who -- while paid on time every month -- went without raises for a long time and barely complained[0]). It was 90% struggle, 90% problems, solving one at a time, moving on to the next, and never getting overwhelmed. Unsurprisingly, he was also a very good small plane pilot (IFR/Weather and a mess of others; he flew multiple times/week often cross-country with a breathing mask hooked up to a tank due to the altitude and lack of pressurization on a Cherokee).

So basically my lesson was that in order to be successful, you have to suffer for a long time, work harder than you're capable of at the peek of your health, and if you can figure out all of the problems while still providing something your customers want, you'll be successful. The first two parts are almost always "minimum requirements" -- there is the occasional "lazy genius" and the more frequent "trust-fund successful", but if you're starting at 19 years old, newly married out of high school (no kids) doing construction, you're very unlikely to become wealthy without a lot of hard work (outside of the lottery/similar luck-related ventures that don't serve any educational value to the consumer). As irony would have it, the story of my Dad's life is one of the (smaller) reasons I chose to work for someone rather than run a business[1].

I think most of us watch/read these things more for the entertainment value. Perhaps I tell myself it's learning, but it's a mix of curiosity and voyeurism. But nobody has to tell me watching a biography about a successful person means "success is easy" or more common than failure. I've watched, participated in, read about or seen on TV nearly every form of failure there is. Thankfully the "participated in" category isn't as bad as it could be.

[0] It's hard to complain when the owner will pull crap out of a toilet with his bare hands before asking an employee to find a plunger, can and does do any job on the factory floor and seemingly lives at the place. There wasn't a menial task below him and he'd take it if someone could do the more important job better ... he was always a humble guy.

[1] I'm not afraid of hard work -- it was mostly about what he had to work on and knowledge (from a brief stint running my own business) that if I had to do that with the majority of my time, I'd be miserable. The products/services my Dad's business sold weren't "his life's passion" even though what he provided was extremely important to his customers and ultimately, anyone who drives a car. Running the business, managing the finances, and making "the machine" operate were his life's passions, so spending almost all of his time on finances/growing the business was what drove him.

I loved that show and think it finished rather than was cancelled.

But many of the folks I recommended it to, didn’t like it. Various reasons provided but I remember stuff like “depressing” and “failure” coming up a lot.

I tried watching it, couldn't get past the first season because of the characters. I've dealt with enough asshole Steve Jobs wannabes and the 10x rockstar programmer types in real life that watching them on screen gives me PTSD.