Why leaders miss their own best stories

When Joan Didion encountered a five-year-old stoned on LSD in 1967 Haight-Ashbury, she didn't react with horror. She didn't clutch her pearls or call Child Protective Services. Years later, reflecting on that scene, she simply said it was "gold."

And not in the sense of "that was a lovely parenting moment." Gold, as in: This is the scene that holds the weight, the contradiction, the dark heart of the whole story. It was a moment that made the piece inevitable.

That's what writers look for. Ghostwriters especially. I live for the moment when a client, almost in passing, drops something that makes my ears perk up like a dog who just heard the word bacon. It might be a throwaway anecdote, a moment they barely remember. But to me? Narrative gold.

The Antennae Are Always Up

In leadership ghostwriting, these moments matter more than anything. As the New Yorker's Susan Orlean once put it, good writers develop "antennae for the significant detail." I'm trained to notice when a client's voice shifts. When they pause midsentence. When they offhandedly mention something like promoting a janitor to department head and breeze right past it like it's no big deal.

But it is a big deal. Because that moment—that very human, very real moment—is what readers will remember long after they've forgotten your five-point leadership framework.

I'm like an anthropologist, if anthropologists had to work on deadline and couldn't expense their fieldwork drinks. I show up with notebooks (or Zoom transcripts), sift through your stories, and look for what glimmers beneath the surface.

Why Leaders Miss Their Own Best Stuff

It's not that executives aren't thoughtful people. Three things work against them:

They're trained to move forward, not linger. They're fluent in vision, mission, and metrics—but often tone-deaf to the quiet moments that shaped who they are.

They suffer from story blindness. When you've lived through something, you stop noticing its narrative potential. It's like being immune to your own company's jargon—you think everyone understands what you mean by "synergistic optimization," but the rest of us just hear noise.

They undervalue vulnerability. Which is understandable. They've built careers on control, poise, and polish. But books don't reward polish. Books reward truth. Readers want the real story—especially the one you didn't plan to tell.

What feels mundane to them—a tough conversation, a botched presentation, a personal meltdown in the Tokyo hotel bar—gets mentally filed under "stuff that happened," not "stuff that belongs in a book."

What Gold Actually Looks Like

Narrative gold doesn't mean a helicopter crash or a courtroom scandal. (Though, if you have those, I'll definitely use them.) It's more often the moment you considered quitting. The time your mentor dressed you down—and was right. The late-night email you regret sending, or the one you're glad you did.

It's the story that makes readers lean forward. Not because it's flashy, but because it's honest.

J. R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter behind Open and Spare, calls this the "vein of gold." For Andre Agassi, it was the shocking revelation that he hated tennis. That one admission reshaped the entire book. It turned a sports memoir into a meditation on identity, expectation, and freedom.

That's the alchemy. One line, properly framed, can carry an entire chapter—or the whole damn book.

Why These Moments Matter So Much

Here's the thing: business books packed with platitudes don't exactly fly off the shelves. You can only read so many variations of "innovate or die" before you start rooting for extinction.

But when a book starts with a moment of failure, regret, or transformation, we pay attention. Stories stick. Theories don't.

You don't need hard numbers to prove this—just walk into a bookstore and pick up the leadership bestsellers. You'll see this pattern over and over again. They start with something real. Something personal. Something just a little bit messy.

And here's the business case: these authentic moments directly translate to book sales, speaking fees, and media coverage. Anecdotes are what land you the book deal. They're what make the media bites quotable. They're what give your ideas emotional weight, so readers not only understand your insight but feel it.

Look at Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. The book's success wasn't built on Nike's financial metrics—it was built on Knight's story of almost going bankrupt, of betraying partners, of nearly losing everything multiple times. Those vulnerable moments made the business lessons unforgettable.

Without those moments, your memoir risks sounding like a really long LinkedIn post with better punctuation.

How I Find the Gold

Finding these stories isn't always easy. Clients don't walk into our first meeting and drop their soul on the table. Sometimes it takes three interviews, two espressos, and a full conversation about their golden retriever before we get there.

In fact, some of the best material surfaces at the end of a call—after we've wrapped, when they're "just remembering one last thing." Or while they're walking out the door. Or when they send an email later that night with the subject line "Not sure if this is useful . . ."

It's almost always useful.

I have a few tricks to nudge things along. I'll ask for day-by-day playbacks of big events. I'll ask about their biggest regrets. Or when they first realized they weren't bulletproof. I might ask what the office smelled like during layoffs. (If that doesn't trigger a memory, nothing will.)

And I ask clients to journal between interviews—not because I'm a fan of homework, but because it often jogs something they haven't thought about in years. A memory that's been waiting patiently for the right time to surface.

Here's what I tell clients before our first interview: come prepared to be surprised by your own stories. The moment you dismiss as "probably not interesting" is often exactly what I'm looking for.

The Delicate Art of Story Surgery

Once I find these moments, I don't just plop them on the page and call it a day. I handle them with care. With context. With tone.

There's a fine line between powerful vulnerability and oversharing. Between honesty and therapy. My job is to walk that line—to preserve the truth of the moment while shaping it into something useful and beautiful.

That's where the real craft is. And the joy.

Because when you get it right—when the structure supports the story, when the voice is authentic, when the reader feels something—they don't just finish the book. They remember it. They recommend it. They see themselves in it.

And that's the point.

Treasure Isn't Always Where You Think

In the age of AI, when you can generate 60,000 words in three clicks and none of them feel alive, the human capacity to recognize this—this moment, this sentence, this story—is more valuable than ever.

Ghostwriting isn't just transcription. It's translation. It's the art of taking the messy, beautiful, complicated reality of someone's life and turning it into something that moves other people.

Sometimes, all it takes is a stray memory, a half-forgotten mistake, a pause in your voice that says more than a thousand keynote speeches. That's the gold. That's what I'm after.

If you're considering a memoir project, start paying attention to those throwaway moments right now. The ones you almost mention but don't. The stories that make you pause. The experiences you've never quite found the right words for.

Those are your treasure maps. And I'm here when you're ready to start digging.