Reading a memoir is borrowing someone’s whole life for a weekend and returning it with notes.

Someone’s account of their own life gives you the inside of decisions you would otherwise only see from outside. You get the hesitation before the brave thing, the years that looked like nothing, the version of events they are still arguing with. That is a kind of experience you cannot buy at any speed, borrowed for the cost of a few evenings.

Choose one about a life unlike yours rather than one that confirms your own. Keep a pencil nearby and mark the places where you would have chosen differently. Those marks are where your own thinking becomes visible to you.