As a kid, I remember going to the library at my school and learning about different genres of books for the first time. We learned about the differences between fiction and nonfiction and then we delved a little bit deeper into each to learn about some of their subcategories. More vividly than anything else that day, I remember learning about the difference between a biography and an autobiography and I remember finding it fascinating and also strange.

Why would anyone write a biography about a person when that person already had an autobiography? What more was there to learn? After all, the person who wrote the autobiography knows the subject matter better than anyone else could, right? And that’s all I thought there was to it; just the story of a person’s life. Until I recently remembered this thought while I was watching an episode of "How I Met Your Mother".

I know you’re probably thinking “A story of a child’s ignorance and popular sitcom about some people in their 20s, how on earth are these things related?” And it’s a fair question, but the answer requires a deeper look at the premise of the episode.

The episode in question is an episode entirely based on the idea of different perspectives and how that impacts different memories of the same story. Each character remembers the same night in a different way and each one is correct to some degree, but not entirely correct. The same concept is true of why we are interested in the story of someone not only from their own perspective but also from the perspective of someone else.

As a kid, I didn’t think twice about believing each perspective because I thought that they must all be identical and accurate. If I had written my own autobiography as a child, I would have included each detail because, after all, it is about me. But as I grew older, I realized that all of our stories are morphed by an innate bias.

We are all influenced by our own bias no matter what. Even if you try to eliminate the influence, it is impossible because each person is changed by their life experiences. Just as each of the characters in "How I Met Your Mother" had different ideas of what had happened one night, it is hard to trust just a single source to tell the story of someone’s life, even if that source is the person who lived it.

After coming to this understanding, you are able to get a better understanding overall of the person because you are able to look across perspectives and see what is true through each retelling of the same series of events. It is through this cross-analysis of sources that we are able to find the truth in every story.