Bryan Johnson explains why he reads biographies: they reveal how the people he admires spot something barely visible on the horizon, declare it worth pursuing, and then advance it inch by inch while others can't see it or think it's impossible.
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.
