> No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.
You and OP make way too much of this. Have you actually read any autobiographies? As with any piece of writing, you have to form your own judgements, but people can't completely fabricate their life stories or delude themselves about the reasons for their success.
Autobiographies I've read, and enjoyed, even though I think the writers are all in different ways dishonest, include Malcolm X (street gangster turned religious leader), Gandhi (moralistic prig with weird sexual perversions), Bertrand Russell (projects saintly calm but had weird bouts of rage) and 50 Cent (claimed he never smoked crack, and it only accidentally ended up in his bloodstream). Still, I believe all four are accurate when describing the reasons for their success.
(For more honest auto-biographies, I'd recommend Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, and Richard Feynman, off the top of my head).
Either way, no-one writes "I achieved X by doing Y and Z, it was simple", it's more like "I tried to achieve X by doing A, and that went disastrously, then I tried B, and made some progress, then I realised X was a waste of time and went after Y, and noticed most people who wanted Y did Z but that didn't work for them, so I tried doing C, then D, and then E, and that's when things began taking off".
Of Churchill's work, I found Savrola, a novel he wrote at 24, to be the among most revealing . . .
"Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what? A people's good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it."
Not sure which Feynman biography you are alluding to, but if you're talking of his anecdotes - "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", I don't think those are really honest bio. They dont talk about the incredibly hard work that Feynman did in order to become a genius. He worked incredibly hard, for incredibly long. His anecdotes cultivated a profile of a joker and a genius. He was probably both, but he got to the genius part by working extremely hard.
Yes, I've read plenty. At best, they're about personal philosophies, at worst, it's self congratulations and excuses. How many subjects cooperated with a biographer and didn't like the outcome? Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos are two off the top of my head. People don't like that kind of mirror.
Feynman is great and I'll get to Franklin in time. But the way people talk about biographies without distinguishing (like OP) and book stores place them side by side glosses over the wild differences in the two categories.
You and OP make way too much of this. Have you actually read any autobiographies? As with any piece of writing, you have to form your own judgements, but people can't completely fabricate their life stories or delude themselves about the reasons for their success.
Autobiographies I've read, and enjoyed, even though I think the writers are all in different ways dishonest, include Malcolm X (street gangster turned religious leader), Gandhi (moralistic prig with weird sexual perversions), Bertrand Russell (projects saintly calm but had weird bouts of rage) and 50 Cent (claimed he never smoked crack, and it only accidentally ended up in his bloodstream). Still, I believe all four are accurate when describing the reasons for their success.
(For more honest auto-biographies, I'd recommend Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, and Richard Feynman, off the top of my head).
Either way, no-one writes "I achieved X by doing Y and Z, it was simple", it's more like "I tried to achieve X by doing A, and that went disastrously, then I tried B, and made some progress, then I realised X was a waste of time and went after Y, and noticed most people who wanted Y did Z but that didn't work for them, so I tried doing C, then D, and then E, and that's when things began taking off".