Why We Do That

For a decade, I made a living by disappearing.

That’s the honest way to describe ghostwriting. People imagine it’s about writing, and it is, eventually. But before a single sentence gets written, it’s about vanishing. You set your own voice down at the door, the way you’d take off muddy shoes, and you step into someone else’s way of seeing the world.

I’ve done this thirty-three times. Thirty-three books that carry other people’s names, other people’s stories, other people’s wisdom, with not a trace of me anywhere in them. Founders, executives, coaches, a few people whose lives were so strange and lovely I still think about them while I’m stuck in traffic.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that job. To write as someone, you have to notice everything about them.

The big things are easy, and they’re usually in the brief anyway. Grew up here, built this, believes that. To sound like a person, you need the small things. You need to know that when he’s excited he talks in questions. That she says “to be fair” right before she disagrees with you. That he goes quiet, properly quiet, whenever his father comes up, and then changes the subject with a joke that arrives half a second too fast.

I’d sit on calls with these people for hours, and my actual job, the thing I was truly being paid for, was attention. I was being paid to notice a human being at a level most of us never notice anyone. Sometimes not even the people we live with. Sometimes not even ourselves.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing an apprenticeship. Thirtythree apprenticeships, really. Each one in a different inner life.

Ghostwriting wasn’t even where the apprenticeship started. Before anyone paid me to write, hospitality paid me to notice: waiting tables, working wine farms, learning to read a table before it read me, because your whole shift goes better when you can tell the celebrating couple from the arguing one by the time you’ve said good evening. Later, for a few months just before the pandemic, I managed a guesthouse, where the whole art was anticipating what a guest needed before they’d asked, and sometimes before they knew. And I studied through all of it, degrees stacked on top of day jobs, always both at once. Capacity was the lesson. The cost of capacity came later, and it’s in this book too.

The noticing never stopped being the job, either. These days I run strategy and customer success, which means I sit inside founders’ businesses week after week, reading rooms, reading calls, reading the gap between what a client says in a check-in and how they say it. The job title has changed several times in a decade. The actual work never has.

And somewhere along the way, without meaning to, I learned the thing this whole book is about.

***

Let me tell you when it clicked.

I was on a call with a client, a founder, one of those brilliant and slightly terrifying people who answer emails at 11pm and consider weekends a rumour. We were working through a chapter about his company’s hardest year. He was telling the story the way he always told it, polished and quick, the version he’d clearly told at dinners.

And then I asked about one specific week. A small detail from an earlier call that didn’t fit the polished version.

He stopped. There was this pause, maybe three seconds, which on a video call feels like a month. And then he told me what that year had actually been like. The insomnia. The pretending. The morning he sat in his car in the parking garage for forty minutes because he couldn’t make himself go in.

When he finished, he laughed a little and said, “Nobody’s ever asked me about that week.”

Nobody’s ever asked.

This man had a wife, a co-founder, a leadership team, a therapist he mentioned once and never again, hundreds of employees and thousands of followers. He was surrounded by people. And the version of him sitting in that parking garage had gone entirely unnoticed for four years, until a ghostwriter in Cape Town asked a follow-up question.

I wish I could tell you he was rare. He wasn’t. That moment happened, in one form or another, in almost every book I worked on.

Ask a real question, wait a beat longer than is comfortable, and out comes a person nobody has been paying attention to.

Across thirty-three books, I stopped being surprised by it. Then I started being troubled by it. Because if nobody was really noticing these people, the visible ones, the successful ones, the ones with audiences, what did that say about how well any of us are being seen?