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Let there be more biographies of failures - by Henry Oliver

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Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose great work was left in ruins. The point of biography is to set an example, to teach us how other people did the things we want to do. That might be something grand like live a good life, or it might be something more mundane like manage a small company. Whatever it is, the genre suffers from selection bias. Only the successful get biographies.

Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose great work was left in ruins. The point of biography is to set an example, to teach us how other people did the things we want to do. That might be something grand like live a good life, or it might be something more mundane like manage a small company. Whatever it is, the genre suffers from selection bias. Only the successful get biographies. But we will not all be successful, and if that is our main criteria we won’t learn as much from biography as we could. There’s…

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