Ep. #142: Book Club: My Top 5 Takeaways from Benjamin Franklin - An American Life

If you look into the reading habits of extremely successful people, you’ll notice that many of them spend a lot of time reading biographies and autobiographies.

For example, top Nike designer and entrepreneur D’Wayne Edwards attributes much of his unlikely professional success to a biography of Jackie Robinson that inspired him to endure great hardship.

Elon Musk has also spoken many times about his love of biographies of brilliant inventors and entrepreneurs, including Howard Hughes, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and, fittingly, Benjamin Franklin.

There are several reasons why this type of literature is so popular among overachievers.

First, we humans love good stories, and if someone has a book dedicated to his or her life, chances are it’s because they have an unusual and compelling story to tell.

Second, biographies are the ultimate in self-improvement literature because they provide you with wide-ranging, raw, and unfiltered information and insights as opposed to carefully chosen and pre-digested morsels.

Unlikely most self-help books, biographies aren't making carefully crafted arguments intended to sell you on particular ideas, strategies, or ideologies—they're showing you the real-world results of very different paradigms for thinking and living, which you can then assess and analyze to formulate your own highly individual lessons and takeaways.

In this way, a biography is a "choose your own adventure" of sorts, and can resonate in very different ways with each and every reader.

So, with that, let's talk about this week's book, which is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Benjamin Franklin, and a book that sits on the "must read" lists of many notable people.

I loved it for several reasons:

First, I'm a bit of an Isaacson fanboy. He's not only an outstanding researcher, writer, and storyteller, but he has also worked his ass off for decades to hone his craft and establish himself as one of the premier biographers of our times.

Second, I think that Franklin was a man worth modeling in many ways. What spoke most to me was his intense curiosity, diligence, persistence, practicality, lightheartedness, congeniality, and relentless drive to improve both his life and the lives of others. The world could use more Franklins.

Third, I've always enjoyed American history and the Revolutionary period in particular, and as Franklin played a pivotal role in both the winning of the war and creation of America, I was already inclined to like the book.

The bottom line is if you're already into biographies but haven't read this one yet, I promise it won't disappoint. Similarly, if you've never read a biography before and my pitch has sold you on giving it a go, this is a great place to start.

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