Why You Should Write Your Autobiography (Part 1): Unveiling Your Unique Story

0:00Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

0:30And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. I just want to give a real simple reason why you should consider writing an autobiography. And now you may think to yourself, well, what do I need to write an autobiography for?

1:08I write about sports or I write about science or I write fiction. That has nothing to do with autobiographies. And I'm going to tell you now that that is a myth of autobiography. And we're going to see many examples, many well-known famous books that you've read or studied or heard about are actually at heart autobiographies.

1:33This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

1:46The simple definition of an autobiography is a book that you write about your life. Now, let me ask you a question. Imagine if your great, great, great grandmother or grandfather or anybody in your distant family tree that you don't even know about now, imagine if they had written an autobiography. Could have been just 10 pages, could have been 50 pages, could have been 500 pages. But they wrote a book describing what their daily life was like, what their troubles were, what their tragedies were, what the high points of their life were, gossip about their neighbors and other relatives they had and how they met their husband or wife or, you know, what their job was like and what they did every day.

2:29Imagine if your great, great, great grand ancestor wrote this. I would be so happy if that happened. I have no idea even the names of my great-great-grandparents, let alone what their days were like, what their life was like, how they were born, how they died, what their tragedies were. Imagine if you write your autobiography, let's say nobody reads it. Who cares? Your great-great-grandchildren and beyond are gonna be so happy you wrote this book. Maybe even your children will be happy you wrote this book, but certainly the descendants who never got to know you, but wish they did, will be grateful you wrote something about your life.

3:06It doesn't matter if you're a good writer, they don't care. It doesn't matter if you include every page of your diary, they don't care. It doesn't matter if it's 10 pages or a thousand pages, they don't care. They wanna get to know you somehow and this is gonna be the way they get to know you. So of course, that's a very simple and basic definition of an autobiography. An autobiography doesn't necessarily mean it starts off with, I was born in Kansas on this day, and here's the rest of my life. That's not what an autobiography is. So there's several types of categories of books and there are more than these, but I'm going to describe very broad categories of books.

3:45One, memoirs are obviously a type of autobiography. So what's a memoir? It's somebody who's famous maybe tells their life story and it starts off, you know, I was born in this state And then I went to the school and then I was president of the United States. And then there was a war. And then this is what I did after I was president of the United States and so on. So many famous people, whether they're presidents or movie stars or historical figures or great writers have written their own memoirs and people are interested in reading them because they're kind of like a history of that period of time.

4:23Like what was that leader thinking? What was that superstar thinking in their life? And how did they create such impact? People are interested in memoirs. And that's kind of the classic definition of an autobiography, but that is not at all the full definition of an autobiography. So let me move on. What's another category of book? Well, nonfiction books. So if you buy a book, like the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari, that's a nonfiction book about the history of the human race. or Freakonomics is a nonfiction book about behavioral finance and the weird kind of economics and economic experiments that Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dovner have done throughout their careers.

5:05Malcolm Gladwell, his book Blink or The Tipping Point or Outliers. These are classic nonfiction books. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, classic nonfiction book. So it's an example of a nonfiction book where I will state those are not very autobiographical at all, but we'll get to that in a second. Another type of category I want to talk about is what I call the mini memoir. So it might not be the case that someone wants to write a memoir of their entire life, but maybe a very specific period of their life. So we saw a lot of examples of this after a war for instance, like after World War II or the Vietnam War or even the Iraq War, somebody comes back and talks about the experiences of being in that war.

5:54And that's like a mini memoir. They don't really talk about before the war or after the war. It's just this particular slice of time in their life and they write it in a memoir style. So I'm going to call that for now the mini memoir. A classic example might be Tim O 'Brien in his book, The Things They Carried. It's basically a collection of stories of things that happened to him in Vietnam. Now, when it was originally published, it was considered a collection of fictional short stories, but a lot of books then that were really autobiographical were really disguised autobiographies. And so Tim O 'Brien's collection, The Things They Carried, it does not refer at all to the period in his life before the Vietnam War or after the Vietnam War, but it's a collection of stories of things that happened to him during the Vietnam War.

6:39And then another type of book, of course, is fiction. Now, there's all sorts of genres of fiction, from thriller to romance to mystery to horror. But there's a kind of style of fiction. I'm going to call it autobiographical fiction, the book Post Office by Charles Bukowski. And there's a little interesting history to this. Charles Bukowski worked in the post office for about 20 or 30 years. And then finally, someone said to him, hey, you're such a great writer. He had published in various journals and magazines. Someone said to him, you're such a great writer. I'll give you$100 a week and you could quit at the post office and just write.

7:20And Charles Piazzi quit his job and then he got so nervous that what if he didn't succeed as a writer? He wrote his first book in just two weeks. It was called Post Office. Even though it was packaged as a novel, it was really, again, almost like a mini memoir of his time in the post office. And he had a great first line, it started as a mistake, which I love that first line because what is he referring to? It. And what started? How did it start? And why did it start as a mistake? If it started as a mistake, why did he do it? Why was it done? So it was an intriguing way to start the story. And again, it was packaged by his publisher as a novel, but in reality, it was a mini memoir of his time in the post office.

8:01And finally, a category I call hybrids, where it seems like another type of book, but it's actually an autobiography. So for instance, I just mentioned two books that were packaged differently, but were in fact autobiographies. So Post Office was one where, again, it was packaged as a novel, but it was in fact a real true-to-life memoir of Charles McAlsey's time in the Post Office. Another book that I just mentioned was The Things They Carried, which was originally packaged as a fictional collection of short stories, but was actually a memoir of Tim O 'Brien's time in the Vietnam War. And there's many other examples of hybrids.

8:41I'll give you a good nonfiction one. This book is called The Puzzler. It's by my good friend, AJ Jacobs. He writes many, many memoirs. And this one specifically is about a year in his life where he just intensely dived into puzzles, solving them, meeting people who were obsessed with puzzles or who created puzzles. He traveled all over the world for puzzle contests. You would buy this book, The Puzzler, because you like puzzles and you want to learn about puzzles. And it's the history of puzzles in here. He goes everything from chess puzzles to Sudoku to crossword puzzles to he and his family compete in the World Jigsaw Puzzling Competition.

9:21But it's completely also an autobiography and uses autobiography techniques. So for instance, I'll just start off with the first couple of sentences. One winter morning, several years ago, I got an email with some ridiculously exciting news, or so I thought. The email was from a friend who informed me that the answer to one down in that day's New York Times crossword puzzle was me, AJ Jacobs. The clue was AJ blank, author of The Know-It-All. My first reaction was, this is the greatest moment of my life. And it goes on and on, where he talks about his own experiences diving into every type of puzzle.

9:59Like there's chapters on Japanese puzzle boxes, Rubik's Cube, chess puzzles, visual puzzles, ciphers and secret codes. But it's always AJ's experiences while he's exploring this entire subculture of puzzles. And if you think about it, many nonfiction books that you've read have probably had that format where it's someone's personal experience experiencing something true. So it's considered a nonfiction book. but it's actually a hybrid. It uses all the techniques of autobiography. And again, a great nonfiction book will often have two ways, two entries into the story. One is if you've been following A.J.

10:42Jacobs' life story and he's written many of these mini memoirs, you'll be excited. Oh, another A.J. Jacobs book. Or if you love puzzles and you're searching for a good book about puzzles and the whole subculture of puzzles and the history of puzzles and different types of puzzles and experiences you could have in the world of puzzle making, you might find this book, The Puzzler, and start reading it. So it's clearly a nonfiction book about puzzles, but it's also secretly deep down an autobiography. And there are many famous examples of hybrids. This is just one. This was a New York Times bestseller.

11:15I want to add to a lot of writers in particular and musicians and other artists are worried, is AI eventually going to be able to do what I do? For instance, if you're a writer, you might wonder, will AI write better books than me? If your books have an autobiographical component and you know the craft and skill of not just writing, but also the craft and skill of writing a book in an autobiographical style, then AI could never, ever, ever hope to compete with that. Humans are always on the frontier of knowledge. AI is great at summarizing that knowledge and putting it to use in new and unique ways, But ultimately, the frontier of all the knowledge is created and experienced by humans.

12:01And combining your own personal experience with a topic that many, many people might relate to, it's a type of autobiography and a very valuable type of autobiography. Often those books are extreme bestsellers. So what does that mean? A memoir, a mini memoir, maybe a fiction book that is largely autobiographical, maybe a nonfiction book. for instance, about puzzles or a self-help book or a book about the president of the United States, but actually at heart is really an autobiography. Why should you do an autobiography or an autobiographical book, I should say? Well, the first reason is other than that you love writing and writing is a creative art and you like being creative, the first important reason we have to address is money.

12:48You can make a lot of money writing. Maybe on the first book, you make a lot of money. Maybe on the second, the third. Some of it is quantity versus quality where you have to put out a lot of books to make money. But people do make an enormous amount of money writing. And I'll give you an example. Here's the book, Atomic Habits by my friend James Clear. This book has sold over 8 million copies. You could say it's about habits. In the subtitles, tiny changes, remarkable results, an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. Well, you might say this is a nonfiction book. It's not an autobiography.

13:25Let's take a look. The first chapter is called My Story. And here's the first paragraph. On the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in the face with a baseball bat. As my classmate took a full swing, the bat slipped out of his hands and came flying toward me before striking me directly between the eyes. I have no memory of the moment of impact. The bat smashed into my face with such force that had crushed my nose into a distorted U-shape. The collision sent the soft tissue of my brain slamming into the inside of my skull. Immediately, a wave of swelling surged throughout my head.

13:59In a fraction of a second, I had a broken nose, multiple skull fractures, and two shattered eye sockets. So then you say to yourself, wait, that doesn't sound like a book about habits. He just told a story about how when he was in high school, a baseball bat flew out of his teammate's hand and smashed his skull in. What does this have to do with atomic habits? So it's interesting. In order to write a nonfiction book, in many cases, you have to experience life in such a way that it becomes important to you, in this case, to learn how to have habits. So the book becomes this story of James Clear, the author.

14:35It's like an autobiography, almost, of how this bat caused some severe medical problems. And he wanted to be a professional baseball player. His dad had been a semi-professional baseball player. He wanted ultimately to be a professional baseball player, but he couldn't even play for the rest of high school. I mean, he was in serious medical issues. They had to put him in a medically induced coma. They didn't really know how he was going to, they flew him to a hospital. We hear all the details of the flight to the hospital and how this was the same hospital his sister was at when she had leukemia years earlier.

15:07So you're getting very autobiographical details. And then in college, he did make the team. He's finally started recovering from his medical issues, but he had to build up again. He had to build up slowly, one habit at a time. And this became his story of how he built such habits that he became an elite college athlete and then an elite writer, a writer to such a degree that he sold 8 million copies. I mean, his career is definitely writing. He made a lot of money from writing. You could say that's just the beginning of the book. It's not the rest of the book is about habits, but there's a lot of autobiographical material in this book and I'll have more examples from this book and some other books, but money could be an important motivation to add autobiographical aspects to your book.

15:53Again, I'll use as an example, The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs. A lot of people were interested in puzzles. They never heard of A.J. Jacobs, but I, for instance, loved A.J. Jacobs' writing. He had many memoirs or hybrids in his book, The Year of Living Biblically, in his book, The Know-It-All, and several other books I wanted to read. the latest AJ Jacob book. And his books are major New York Times bestsellers, and he makes a great living from writing. Another author who I admire very much, and she's been on my podcast several times, is Annie Duke, who's a professional poker player. And she wrote a book called Thinking in Bets.

16:31Of course, I was interested in what she meant by thinking in bets, but I also wanted to learn more about her poker career. There's autobiographical aspects all throughout that book. Suffice it to say, money is an important reason to add autobiographical context to your books. So never be ashamed if money is the reason why you want to do something. My best-selling book that has made me the most amount of money, and I'll talk about it later, was a memoir-style book called Choose Yourself. And even though there were a lot of non-fiction aspects of that book or self-help aspects, it ultimately was a memoir.

17:09Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

17:40And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash Altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. But another important reason, and I shouldn't say this is a different reason, when you write an autobiographical book, you should have something unique to say.

18:19Now, again, if all you want to say is, this is my life and my book is for my great, great grandchildren, you don't need anything else. But if you want a book that is widely read, you want to have something that's unique to say. Now, important reason to write an autobiographical book, though, is that no one has your life. No one has your unique experiences. So if you could take your unique experiences and create a book out of it, whether it's a memoir or a nonfiction book like Atomic Habits or a fiction book like Post Office by Bukowski, I mentioned earlier, or On the Road by Jack Kerouac is another example of a fictional novel that, in fact, was autobiography, then that's great.

18:59But in addition to saying something unique about your life and why your life's unique and why your experiences are unique, you should have some overriding philosophy or point that is the reason why you're writing. So for instance, I'll just use AJ as an example. No one had really written a book about the history of puzzles in such a unique way where he's experiencing things as he learns things. So it's like edutainment. He also has a humorous style. so we follow his journey while he's learning about the history of puzzles and some of the most amazing puzzles in the world and the entire subculture of puzzles.

19:33He noticed there was a gap in the marketplace. No one had written a book like this and certainly no one had written a book that had autobiographical components. So suddenly it becomes unique in two ways. If you have something interesting to say and you have an interesting way to say it, i.e. by using your own life as an example, then that's great. Perhaps one of the most important books in history that's been written like this was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. The book is an autobiography. It's a memoir of his experiences in a concentration camp. But there are many books that are like that, many beautiful Nobel Prize winning books about someone surviving the horrors and stresses of concentration camps in World War II.

20:16But Viktor Frankl also, the book is titled, it's not titled My Journey in Concentration Camps or How I Survived Concentration Camps, But the title is Man's Search for Meaning. So he uses his own life to basically express his philosophy that the way he survived the concentration camp and the way you and me and everyone else can survive the tragedies that naturally come up in life is by always searching for meaning. What is the meaning of your life? If you're going through a bad situation, whether it's something as horrific as Viktor Frankl is going through or a bad breakup in a romance or the loss of a loved one or any sort of trauma, finding the meaning in your life and the meaning of these events will help you live and even live strongly and thrive past these tragic events.

21:09Nassim Taleb might call it anti-fragility after his book, Anti-Fragile. But Viktor Frankl in this memoir, he basically doesn't conclude about his own experience. He takes his own life and says, this is why searching for meaning is important for everybody. Every person on earth needs to find meaning in their lives and that will give them the ability and the strength to get through bad experiences. So it's totally a nonfiction book. It's a philosophical book, but it's also an autobiography. So if you have something unique to say, you can sometimes say it much better and much more relatably. If he just said, everybody needs to search for meaning, I probably would never have read the book.

21:46I would have said, oh, that's a nice notion. Good for him. But because his storytelling and the intensity of the story was so compelling, it's the combination of those elements that makes it one of the best-selling books and one of the greatest books of all time. So that's two reasons to write a book. Money and say something interesting that you don't think has been said before. And another reason, which is related to both, is opportunities. So it might be the case, very few people read my book. Let's say I write a book like James Clear did about habits or even something different. Let's say I write a book about persuasion and I talk about all the negotiating that I've done in my life and each type of negotiating and my own experiences negotiating and what were the bad negotiations, what were the good ones, what were the specific techniques.

22:33So it's a book about negotiation, but I use my own experiences Maybe I'll also tell other people's stories. But let's say not that many people read it. Not that many people read books in general. The average book's read, you know, who knows, a thousand times or whatever. But now I might use that book to embark on a consulting career. Now I'm going to consult with CEOs about negotiating. Or I might use it to embark on a speaking career. So I give inspiring talks or motivational talks at corporate retreats for people who want to learn more about negotiating and persuasion and so on. Or maybe I want to start a company that, you know, advises on negotiation or does the negotiating in, you know, high pressure, high impact deals.

23:12So opportunities, again, as I mentioned in the last course, if somebody has to choose between two equally talented people and they have to choose between the person who wrote a book and the person who didn't write a book, they'll choose the person who wrote a book. That could be you, particularly if you include these autobiographical concepts in your book to make it even that much stronger and more relatable. Who am I? Why am I? Why now? Why are those questions important? So to start off with, I'll give an example. James Frey, about 20 years ago, wrote a memoir called A Million Little Pieces about his experiences as a really severe alcoholic, drug addict, criminal, and so on.

23:55And it's his experiences in rehab while he was trying to recover. And it's an incredibly well written book. It sold millions of copies. It was a great story, great storytelling. I've read the book three or four times. It's a memoir. It's an autobiography. But anybody who's had any problems with addiction also strongly relates to it. And then also, for better or for worse, it was a scandalous book because it turned out the book was largely true, but not 100 % true. He had gone on Oprah to talk about his memoir, everything. And Oprah was shocked that some aspects of the book were fictional. So that's why I mentioned earlier, sometimes a fictional novel could be largely autobiographical, which is why it's important to learn these skills and learn these techniques.

24:42Now, James Frey apologized, but the reality is it's still a great book and it was still largely a memoir. And it was a book about drug addiction and alcoholism. So whether that people want to argue how much was memoir and how much was fiction. I could say that's true for every fictional book and every nonfiction book. Some components are fiction, some components are nonfiction, but the publisher has to label it something and publish it. So anyway, we'll get more to his book later because it was very well written. It was a very well-structured memoir or novel, whatever you want to call it. But who was James Frey?

25:16James Frey, at that moment when he was experiencing the things in the memoir, he was an alcoholic. When he wrote the memoir or when he wrote the novel or the autobiographical novel, he was a writer. So if I was James Frey, I would say, who am I? I'm an ex-drug addict and I'm a writer. Then he had to ask himself, why am I? Well, first and foremost, and we see this from his later books, he wrote about his beginnings as a writer and how obsessed he was with writing all throughout this process, ever since he was a kid. And he traveled around the world, you know, learning and experiencing and really studying the process of writing.