An Invitation – What Matters Most to You?

It’s not a new question.

In The Canterbury Tales, written more than 600 years ago, Chaucer asks, “What is life? What does man ask to have?”

An even older quote from a prayer that goes back more than 2,000 years puts it this way: “What are we? What is our life? What is our lovingkindness? What is our righteousness? What saves us? What is our strength? What is our power?”

Human beings have been meaning-seekers and makers since the dawn of time. We have sought to understand our place in the cosmos, our purpose, responsibilities, and destiny ever since our ancestors first gathered around the fire to tell stories. Humans find meaning in a wide variety of domains, including from love to war, service to self-centeredness, and competition to cooperation. While we are busy marrying, raising children, and launching our careers, we don’t always have time or focus to devote to the eternal question of why we are here, but as our lives unfold, as we become a little older, more successful, and less caught up in the day-to-day, those questions, which never really went away, can now rise to the fore.

Who are we? What is our life? What is our lovingkindness? What is our strength?

It has been my extraordinary privilege, over the past 35 years, to help people grapple with, and perhaps even solve for themselves, these eternal, essential questions. I am not a theologian or a therapist (although a couple of my clients have written checks to “Dr. Levin!”). I have no special training in the business of helping people find meaning in their lives. I am commonly called a ghostwriter, but that term really doesn’t encompass how I serve.

To put it simply, I help people, some extraordinarily successful, some still starting out on life’s journey, and some in the middle, answer these vital questions by helping them identify and share with the world what matters most to them, what gives their lives meaning, purpose, and drive. They talk, I type, and the result is a book.

My clients have won the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, and the World Series. They can be found in the BaseballHall of Fame and the Forbes List. They are Fortune 10 CEOs, the most respected physicians, dentists, therapists, religious leaders, and authorities in the body, mind, and spirit. They are at the top of their fields in financial services, hedge funds, insurance, accounting, law, politics, technology, consulting, publicity, real estate, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and coaching in the world of sports. They have rung the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and they have rung the bell of peace at the World War II shrine in Hiroshima.

Some stories are painful and hard-hitting from individuals who had their lives stripped from them, whether through the loss of a loved one, by enduring sex trafficking, or by surviving the Jewish or Cambodian Holocausts.They came out the other side with a message of hope. They are white, Black, Asian, men, women, young, old, gay, straight, rich, poor … they run the gamut of human experience. They hail from or have settled in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Latin America, South America, Europe, Australia, and the Far East.

And each of them reached a moment when they realized that whatever financial or professional success they had achieved and in most cases, we are talking about people at the highest levels of society by any measure they still needed to do something more with their lives. They needed to capture, describe, and share what had created meaning in their lives for themselves, their families, their industries, and the world.

They wanted to write a book about the meaning of their lives and what mattered most to them. They did not want to die with their music still in them, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

They needed to write a book.

Books aren’t easy. The ratio of people who would like to be authors to those who have authored a book is probably staggering. It is my job to help people make their books happen. We start off by determining a few key things, as follows:

1. Who is the audience they are trying to influence?
2. What matters most to them?
3. What message would they share with the world if they could get the whole world to sit still and listen?
4. How do we structure that message and all its components into a clear and accessible flow of information from them to the reader?
5. In hours-long conversations, what can they tell me that will allow me to draft a chapter that will be one more link in the information chain between them and the reader?
6. What title and subtitle will capture the readers’ attention and explain exactly what benefit they will get from reading the book?
7. How should we publish, distribute, and, if appropriate, market the book to have maximum impact for the audience it is designed to serve?
8. How can we ensure there is value on every page so the reader comes away a different, and perhaps better, person for having read the book?
9. How do we make sure the book is in the client’s voice, not in my voice so that no one even suspects the author of the book had help from someone like me?
10. How can we ensure the book captures, as thoroughly, accurately, and beautifully as possible, the author’s message so their sense of what gives life meaning shines through and inspires readers to find greater meaning in their lives?

A book isn’t just a collection of words on a page; it’s also a huge part of your legacy. It’s a means of conveying meaning from one person to a million people, from one person today to an audience that can include countless individuals not yet born. Or perhaps it is something less grandiose. It might simply be a way of capturing an individual’s story so their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know who they come from, what they stand for …and perhaps … where the money came from!

What makes your life most meaningful? Is it your family? Your career? Something you invented? Your prowess on the athletic field or in the boardroom? Your creativity? Your love of life? The art you collect? The music you perform? The money, the time, and the wisdom you share with charitable or religious organizations?

As we worked on their books, my clients discovered levels of meaning in their lives they might not have otherwise recognized. The process of doing a book was not simply a recollection and recitation of achievements, personal and professional. Instead, the process itself brought more meaning to their lives by demonstrating to them, and to those around them, in their personal and professional spheres, just how full of meaning their lives truly were.

That is why I encourage you to do your book, whether you write it as a memoir, a business book, a fable, a novel, or what have you. I took one of my favorite life lessons as a frontispiece or quote at the beginning of the book, from the great golfer, the accomplished and affable Chi-Chi Rodriguez, who frequently said, “What you take with you is what you leave behind.” Sometimes people describe having a business book as the ultimate leave behind when meeting new prospects. And that’s true. The competition has white papers, a folder, or some marketing trinket. Your book is, indeed, the ultimate leave behind, but in a broader sense, the meaning your life creates is the ultimate leave behind for yourself and all those around you. Truly, what we take with us is what we leave behind.

This is a book about the varieties of meaning I have helped transform into books for a wide range of individuals. If you are reading this, perhaps you are considering creating a book that will be a vital part of your legacy, capturing for all time what matters most to you, what is most meaningful to you, and what you most desire to share with the world. Later, I will explain more about the process of how these books came into being, and how yours can, too.

But for now, in thinking about my past clients, more than 1,000 over 35 years, I have found that the most impactful stories resonate deeply with at least one of our basic human needs. As explained by Tony Robbins, we have six essential needs that must be fulfilled if we are to live our best, most enriching lives. These needs are as follows:

• Certainty, the “assurance that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure.”
• Uncertainty/ variety, “the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli.”
• Significance, “feeling unique, important, special, or ”
• Connection/ love, “a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something.”
• Growth, “an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding.”
• Contribution, “a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others.”

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to help convey the stories of incredible individuals who have shaped their lives around fulfilling these needs, both for themselves and others, and it is my hope that as you read about them, you can decide which of these needs is most meaningful to you.