I finished rereading Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction, an autobiography about Willis Johnson’s journey to build Copart. Its Amazon and Goodreads reviews were extremely positive: 4.8 and 4.4 stars, respectively. (I haven’t read many books rated that highly.) I’ve read many biographies since I first read this one, and this time, I wanted to understand why the book resonated so well with readers—I wanted to deconstruct his storytelling.

I figured out why readers enjoy this book so much. It’s simple, but genius. The story is told chronologically, which is ideal and not new. (Phil Knight mastered chronological storytelling by naming each chapter in Shoe Dog after a year in his journey.) But Johnson presented his story differently.

In most chronological biographies, each chapter represents a period in the subject’s journey. The reader is left to identify the important parts of each long segment and figure out why they’re important. The reader has to think a lot.

In Johnson’s book, in each chapter, he presents several lessons he learned during that segment of his journey. He titles the lesson (e.g., “Admit Your Mistakes”) and then includes a short story to explain how he learned it and the result.

The genius of this approach is that the reader doesn’t have to think. The big takeaway (i.e., the lesson learned) is stated clearly, and reading the story reinforces the lesson. This helps readers learn more of the valuable things Johnson learned.

This method eliminated any fluff; the book is short, only 172 pages. I think Johnson’s book is so highly rated because it delivers maximum value in a few pages (relatively speaking) and doesn’t require readers to figure out what’s important or why.

I like Johnson’s approach, and I’m thinking about how to use it in my project. Snippets of lessons learned supported by short stories is a great way to communicate with entrepreneurs. It might even be a framework I can use to concisely communicate the most important info from biographies.