What Will Your Autobiography Focus on?

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

I had an illuminating conversation with a coaching client after I mentioned that the biggest events of my childhood were intellectual epiphanies. He remarked that that was really weird. I hadn’t thought about it, but of course he’s right. In general, I think you can learn a lot about someone by figuring out what they would focus on if they started to write their autobiography. Here are some samples.

• Most will write about their key relationships: mom, dad, siblings, pets, best friends, first lovers.

• Many will write about scary events: the broken arm, the car accident, the neighbor’s being shot.

• Many will write about their biggest accomplishments: the sports trophy, the academic award, the time they had sex with a model.

• Many will write about their biggest adventures: the time they camped for a month, living off the land; the two years they lived in Saudi Arabia because mom’s/dad’s job forced them to go there for a while.

• Many will write about their most intense emotional highs and lows: their first all-encompassing crush, the unbelievable heartbreak, the unexpected accomplishment.

Each of those looks fine to me. However, for me, the biggest moments are, let us say, atypical. I’ll be brief in my descriptions, since they aren’t the main point of this post.

EPIPHANY #1. I used to ask my best friend Greg how old he was. I did this probably every month for a while, even though I knew his birthday was 10 September. I did it because I had just started to be fascinated with dates and numbers. I was 5.5 at the time, and he was 4.5. In response to my question, he would hold up his hand with four fingers up and his thumb halfway up. Like so:

I saw him do this a couple times and then I found inspiration: “You’re holding your thumb that way because you’re four and half, and the thumb is for the half!”. Needless to say, this was totally false. God only knows why he held his thumb in that weird position. But I remember that event even now because it was a huge intellectual epiphany for me.

EPIPHANY #2. I remember being in my room, playing with Legos on the floor. My grandma was sitting in the corner knitting in a rocking chair, looking after me. I suddenly stood up and asked her to teach me how to count to 100. We had already learned it in school but I never paid attention so I didn’t know it. She taught me and my brain was utterly transformed. It was like an intellectual orgasm. Part of the amazement was the realization that there’s a pattern to it all, and it goes on forever. No wonder I still remember it so vividly.

EPIPHANY #3. I remember reading a science book in school that described the atomic theory of matter, suitably simplified for kids. I was shocked at the idea that everything in the universe is made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. (Never mind that that’s not exactly true.) The mere universality of the claim struck me as crazily illuminating.

EPIPHANY #4. I remember taking geometry in my sophomore year in high school, as that was what was available. We were doing proofs in Euclidian geometry, and I just wasn’t understanding the concept at all. On one day, the teacher—who was simply wonderful—gave each kid a theorem to prove. We had to then go up to his desk so that he could evaluate our proofs one on one, privately. I put together a shitty proof and presented it to him. He immediately said it was no good and proceeded to show me how to work it out, in the process of brainstorming. Honestly, it was like a nuclear explosion in my head.

This is easily one of the key moments of my life. To be honest, it was much more important than losing my virginity, for instance.

A couple months later I got in trouble on Christmas because when I was supposed to be cleaning the living room before guests arrived, I was working on a proof of a particularly tough theorem. I turned into a freakin’ proof machine in that math class. For instance, I once got 163% right on an exam, because I did all the extra credit problems at the end of the exam. Not kidding.

EPIPHANY #5. When I took Calculus in high school I ignored the assignments and just did every single problem in the book that had an answer listed in the book’s appendix. I did way more problems than necessary, even though I skipped a bunch that the teacher assigned (the ones that didn’t have answers in the back of the book). I wanted to know if I had done the problem correctly right away, so that’s why I chose the problems answered in the back. This went on for months, and it was my main activity in life. Everything else in my life—family, friends, and so on—paled in comparison.

EPIPHANY #6. In college I studied physics but eventually took a philosophy of religion course. I was stunned to learn that people actually thought about the evidence regarding religious claims—and they evaluated it both fairly and with an open mind. That struck me as absolutely insane, in comparison to anything I had encountered in my life up to then. I have a vivid memory of walking back to my dorm after that philosophy class, muttering to myself as I went through the arguments that had gripped me. I must have looked like a real nutjob to everyone who saw me.

EPIPHANY #7. In college I read a little about the epistemological issues about sense perception, was introduced to the concept of strict solipsism, and was completely flabbergasted. I remember trying incredibly hard to think of ways to independently verify sense perception, but failing over and over again. At one point when I was home visiting my parents, I went into the den to watch sports with my dad, and I wondered—for real—whether he truly existed or was just a stable illusion. It was an unsettling experience, to say the least.

But what about my friendships, lovers, and so on? Wouldn’t I mention them in my autobiography?

Well, most of them strike me as mere details. Yes, they were important. But in the narrative of my life, they don’t stand out as important compared to the intellectual epiphanies. There are a few exceptions: my kids, and my romantic experiences in New York, and Hong Kong, but that’s about it.

I suspect that for some people, who value close relationships over everything else, their autobiography would put those relationships front and center. For an elite athlete, who became a professional, it would be the key events in their training and education in their sport—plus the key victories and defeats. For an artist, it might be some of her most inspired moments of creativity.

As a game to be played with friends or family members, it would be cool for each of them to try to guess what you would emphasize if you started on your autobiography now. And then the focus for the game would go from person to person, around the room. But it would take courage to play this game, since our failures and embarrassments are sure to be things we would be tempted to put in our honest autobiographies.