You Don't Have to Be Fixed First.

This week, I wanted to share a few books from my recent reading pile.

We look at extraordinary people and assume they got there by making better choices than we have. Even their struggles seem cleaner than ours. Then we mistake money for wisdom and decide someone who built a fortune must know how to build a life.

That’s why I keep coming back to biographies. Read between the lines and you find the human being: scared, stubborn, wrong, still figuring it out. You start to see what breakthrough actually looks like.

Not getting everything right. Moving forward with things still broken.

Here's a little of what each one offers:

Robert Coram

John Boyd was a fighter pilot who became a military theorist, and he spent much of his career being passed over, investigated, and pushed to the edge of the institution he was trying to change.

The line that stays with me is Boyd's choice between “being somebody” and doing something that matters. He chose the second path, and the book is honest about the price: money, promotion, reputation, and strain at home.

Boyd also gives you the real version of the OODA loop. It is not just about moving faster. It is about seeing reality clearly enough to get inside the other side's decision cycle.

David Greenberg

You probably know the image of Lewis on the bridge in Selma. Greenberg also follows him into the long political life that came afterward, through elections, defeats, and compromises that don't fit neatly on a poster.

The early sit-in material shows how much preparation went into nonviolence. People had instructions for how to behave when they were abused. They practiced a response before the moment demanded it.

That gives courage a different texture. And the later years ask a harder question: How do you keep working for something when the room stops cheering?

Gary C. Schroen

Schroen led the CIA team sent into Afghanistan shortly after September 11. His account puts you close to the uncertainty of the opening mission, when people had to act before every answer was available.

What interests me is how much depended on relationships built before the emergency. Years of contact with Northern Alliance leaders helped make cooperation possible when time mattered.

Read it as one participant's account, rather than the complete history of the war. It leaves a useful question about your own life: Who would take your call when things went wrong, and why?

Glenn Cunningham, edited by Robert B. Gregg with Cindy Cunningham

Glenn Cunningham was badly burned in a schoolhouse fire as a child. Doctors said he would never walk again. He went on to become one of the great milers of the 1930s, but the running records are almost a side note in his own account.

The book spends its time on the years of rehabilitation, the humiliating early steps, the father who refused to let him quit, and the youth ranch he later built for troubled children. The medals matter less than what he did with the scars.

This is an old-fashioned book in the best and worst sense. It has little interest in self-analysis, but it gives you the long, painful duration of recovery without cutting to the victory scene.

Mike Grossman

Grossman writes about the decisions and disappointments behind his CEO assignments. It's a collection of personal reflections rather than a full-life biography, and I wanted it in this list because he spends time on mistakes a polished career account might hurry past.

Keeping a company alive can still leave the people who helped build it disappointed. Working hard can still produce a bad result. He lets those facts stay uncomfortable.

There is something useful in an experienced person examining a decision without pretending the ending proves he was right. If you're carrying responsibility for other people, this is worth a look.

James N. Mattis and Bing West

Mattis's memoir is about what leaders do before the chaos arrives. Set the intent clearly. Prepare people until the basics hold. Then let them act without waiting for permission every time the situation changes.

The book's strongest idea is that reading and history are part of preparation. You do not begin learning when the pressure starts. You bring whatever you have built before the pressure arrives.

It is a military memoir, and the lessons do not transfer cleanly to every civilian problem. Still, the question is useful: Have you prepared people well enough that your intent survives when you are not in the room?

And if you've read a biography I should get to next, reply and tell me which one.

Pick whichever one makes you curious. You don't have to agree with someone to learn from their life.

And if you've read a biography I should get to next, reply and tell me which one.

Love you all. 🖤