Last week, I shared my updated thoughts on reading multiple biographies about one entrepreneur. Multiple books provide multiple perspectives on an entrepreneur’s experiences, which gets me closer to a 360-degree view of that person’s journey. From a data perspective, I’ve been thinking about the best way to capture an entrepreneur’s journey so it adds value to others.

Multiple books can be written about a person, so there’s a one-to-many relationship between people and books. Therefore, a data record needs to be created for each entrepreneur, and information from various books enhances that record with details about the entrepreneur’s journey.

So, what’s the best way to structure this record for each person? I talked with a few developer friends with experience working with large data sets. Among other ideas, most strongly suggested that I create a proprietary framework optimized for entrepreneurs and fit details from each person’s journey into it. I didn’t like that idea for various reasons, so I continued to ponder. I asked myself, what biographies are best and worst at communicating an entrepreneur’s journey? And why? I also looked for clues in the digests I’ve created.

I realized a few things. The biographies I gained the most from portrayed an entrepreneur’s life with a clear, chronological story. The hardest to digest were the ones with lots of jumping between different periods throughout the book. The person’s journey wasn’t clear, or I didn’t know where I was in the journey. One of my favorite entrepreneur autobiographies, and a highly regarded bestseller, is Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight. I read parts of it again and concluded that one reason so many entrepreneurs like this book is its concise chronology of the struggles Knight endured in Nike’s early years. The book makes sure the reader knows where they are in Knight’s journey by making the title of each chapter a calendar year in Knight’s life (e.g., 1966). Chronology was a key to communicating Knight’s journey effectively.

I read a few digests that I created about books. In each one, I structured the information with a chronological tilt. It wasn’t intentional, so it must have been the best way for me to make sense of and document an entrepreneur's journey. I was trying to create a timeline of the entrepreneur’s journey.

As I thought about this more, I got comfortable with the idea that time could be my framework. Everyone has a birth date and a death date. Their journey is everything that happens in between. People learn from other people’s journeys and the wisdom they gain along the way. I can enhance every entrepreneur’s record in my data set with events and actions at specific times to chronologically document their journey. Every biography or autobiography helps create a clearer picture.

I still have more thinking to do around this, but chronology as a framework resonates as a logical way to organize a data set of entrepreneurs’ journeys.

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