Isn’t It Time to Tell Your Own Story?

By Michael Levin, CEO, Business Ghost, Inc. –

“No one wants to hear my story.” If I could have a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say that…It’s just flat out untrue. We live in a celebrity culture where it seems that unless you can pay a publicist a king’s ransom to get your name and face everywhere, you just aren’t important.

Am I the only one who’s sick of the stories of the people we see on the covers of the magazines at the supermarket checkout counter? Am I really supposed to care about their divorces, their affairs, their honeymoons? I’m not saying that the rest of us have to “get a life.” I’m saying that we already have one. We just don’t value it highly enough.

The key word in that last sentence…is value. As in, what kind of values are we passing on to our children and grandchildren? One could argue that the world is in worse shape today than when our generation inherited it from our parents. Oops. But as the expression goes, I may not be able to change the world, but I don’t have to let the world change me. Or influence me, or my loved ones, in ways of which I don’t approve.

Our children and grandchildren need to know who we are, where we come from, what we stand for, how we got here, and how the values of work, family, spirituality, friendship, and happiness guided us to become the people we are today.

I run a company that ghostwrites and publishes memoirs, mostly of people who aren’t famous and will never be famous. But they’re heroes and heroines to their loved ones.

We did my Mom’s book earlier this year. Along with her parents and a baby sister born on the run, she escaped the Nazi Holocaust…as a four year old. And has the memories to prove it. My teenage children know her as a sweet old lady who loves them…who also has a touch of memory loss and whose movement is limited due to a stroke she suffered a year ago. They had no idea of what she went through, crossing from occupied France into Spain in a hay wagon in 1940 as the war raged on around them. They do now.

Is there a story in your family that needs to be told?  Your story? A parent’s story?

Sometimes people hire us and give us as a holiday, anniversary, or birthday gift to their parents. It’s time to capture the stories that matter – the stories of your family’s lives, the values by which they live, the success, material and familial, they created.

We’re all encouraged to have a financial plan that insures the distribution of wealth to the generations that follow. But what about our intellectual or emotional legacy? Why aren’t we preserving that? We need to show people that there’s more to life than what we see at the checkout counters or on social media.

It’s time for you to write your own story.

Write it…dictate it…hire a smart grad student (or your own grandchild) to interview you. But get it down on paper. So that everyone will know, as the expression goes, who they are and whose they are. Your future will be so much greater if you take the time now to capture the past.

If we can help, please call us at 800 637 6856, or email us at Michael@BusinessGhost.com.