100 Bios
I’m currently re-reading Dale Carnegie’s masterwork, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
The book, written in 1936, has sold 30 million copies and is still used today by teams around the world.
As Carnegie explains, in the preface, he and his team engaged in an almost superhuman (my term) endeavor to research everything they could find to write the book. As an example, they read over 100 biographies of Teddy Roosevelt alone.
Here’s the passage.
“In preparation for this book, I read everything that I could find on the subject – everything from Dorothy Dix, the divorce-court records, and the Parent’s Magazine, to Professor Overstreet, Alfred Adler, and William James.
In addition to that, I hired a trained research man to spend one and a half years in various libraries reading everything I had missed, plowing through erudite tomes on psychology, poring over hundreds of magazine articles, searching through countless biographies, trying to ascertain how the great men of all ages had dealt with people. We read the biographies of the great men of all ages. We read the life stories of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to Thomas Edison. I recall that we read over one hundred biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone. We were determined to spare no time, no expense, to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages to win friends and influence people.
I personally interviewed scores of successful people, some of them world-famous – Marconi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Owen D. Young, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Martin Johnson – and tried to discover the technique they used in human relations.”
Okay, so I imagine some of you are irked by language like, “great men” vs “great women and men” or “great people.” But it was ninety-years ago, so let’s give some grace.
More importantly, that level of prep is staggering. Maybe you don’t need to be quite that prepared to do whatever you’re doing at an exemplar level. But could you read more? Could you talk to more people who are where you want to be so you can learn from them? Could you listen to podcasts (not about murder mysteries but about getting better) on the way into work instead of listening to music?
I bet every person reading this can get better in some of those ways. Of course, some leaders will share that they don’t have the time to do this. I suggest you flip that. Being better will save you time. Being more prepped will save you time. Doing things once and doing them really well will save you time.
No, you don’t need to read 100 biographies of one person. But reading one biography of 100 people feels like a really great idea.
