Bryan Johnson explains why he reads biographies: they show how the people he most admires identify a barely-visible horizon, a goal most can't see, then pursue it inch by inch despite skepticism.
I enjoy biographies because you get a firsthand point of view on the events of a given time and place. You understand the person through their letters, their own words and their own diaries. In these different biographies, one thing I thought was interesting is people who I really admire in their time and place, they survey the landscape of all possible things they could identify. And sometimes they point at the horizon of the thing that can barely be seen and they say, we're going to go after that thing. And the majority of people can't see it, and the majority of people think it's too hard to go after. These people, for some reason, had audaciousness to say, look, do it. And just inch by inch, they push this thing along.
