He’s sold six companies. We’re eleven chapters in, the material is strong, and he’s just told me the book reads like a highlight reel.
I hear a version of that sentence on most executive memoirs I write. Sometimes it arrives as a note in the margin. Sometimes it’s an email at eleven at night. Once it was a man asking me to remove the fact that his father paid for Harvard, because it didn’t fit the story he’d been telling about himself for forty years.
The instinct behind it is decent. Nobody wants to be the person handing out a book about how impressive they are. But acting on the instinct without examining it produces a worse book, and usually a dishonest one, so this is a conversation worth having properly.
Why does my book sound like bragging?
Start with the obvious answer, because you already know it’s true. A memoir of a career is a highlight reel. You sold six companies. The book is about how you sold six companies. That’s the premise, and a reader who picked it up already knows.
Here’s what people confuse, and you may be doing it right now. Describing what you did is not the same as claiming to be the best in the world at it. The first is reporting. The second is a posture, and readers detect it instantly.
The sentence that ends this argument with most clients: the book says this happened, here is what it cost me, and here is what I’d tell you if you were about to try. Nobody resents that. What they resent is the version with no cost in it, where every decision was correct and every quarter went up and to the right. That reads as marketing, and the reader stops believing the whole thing by chapter three.
So is the problem too much achievement? Almost never. It’s too little of everything else.
The test for whether the worry is real
Are some clients right to worry? A few are. A small number of manuscripts genuinely are self-absorbed, and the author is the last person to notice.
Here’s the diagnostic I use. It measures my reaction, not his. A genuinely self-regarding manuscript makes me uncomfortable to read. It’s physical. I find myself wanting to put it down, and I have to stop and ask what would make a reader stay. When that feeling shows up, I say so, and the conversation changes completely.
If I don’t feel it, the author is flinching from a story that’s fine, and your ghostwriter can tell you the same thing if you ask properly.
That gives you something usable. Ask your ghostwriter, your editor or a reader whose judgement you trust: does this make you want to stop reading? Not is it too much about me. The first question gets an honest reaction. The second invites reassurance.
The most famous film about a powerful man tells you almost nothing in his own voice. It is built entirely from the accounts of people who knew him, and he comes out larger and more human for it. There is a structural lesson in that for anyone worried his own memoir sounds like a highlight reel.
Four moves that fix it without losing the story
When the worry is a flinch and the material should stay, four things work. I use all four on nearly every executive memoir.
Get other people on the record. This is the strongest of the four and the one most authors skip. If somebody else describes what you did, it lands completely differently from you describing it, and it costs the book nothing. Interview the co-founder, the operations lead, the assistant who was there for the bad quarter. Quote them directly.
Two warnings. Talk to them yourself instead of printing what the author remembers them saying, because a secondhand quotation in a published book is a real legal exposure and a weak page besides. And take what they say, not the version the author hopes for.
Lead with the feeling instead of the outcome. “We closed at forty million” is a fact. “I sat in the car outside the closing for twenty minutes because I couldn’t work out whether I’d just won” is a scene. The second one has the same achievement inside it and reads as a person instead of a press release.
This is where the low points go, too. The night it nearly collapsed. The payroll you weren’t sure you could meet. Readers came for those as much as for the wins, and a book without them has no shape.
Recast the sentences that open with I. A page where most sentences start the same way feels self-centred whatever the words say, because the rhythm is doing the talking. “When we walked into the meeting, the offer had already changed” carries the same information as “I walked into the meeting and found the offer had changed,” and it doesn’t put the author first in the sentence. Change a third of them and the page transforms.
Give away the credit that’s genuinely owed. Most executives had help and can name it. Putting that on the page is accurate, and it does more for the reader’s opinion of the author than any amount of modesty about the achievement itself. Two of my projects resolved this way entirely, with the author reframing himself as somebody who spotted talent and built teams. It only works if it’s true. Performed humility reads worse than plain reporting.
What will a ghostwriter refuse to write?
I won’t write a version where the money appeared and the author was merely present.
That’s the request underneath some of these conversations, and it produces an unreadable book. The man who wanted Harvard removed was asking me to write a struggle he hadn’t had. We spent three months on it before landing somewhere true. The true version is better, because the interesting question about a man handed advantages is what he did with them. Deleting the advantage deletes the question.
It’s also a practical problem. Readers in your industry know your history. Half of them know who funded you. A memoir that quietly omits a well-known fact doesn’t read as modest, it reads as evasive, and now they’re wondering what else is missing.
Writing it yourself: where do you start?
Short version, if you’re writing this yourself.
Keep every achievement. Add what each one cost. Put the people who helped on the page by name, in their own words where you can get them. Write the failures at the same level of detail as the wins. Almost nobody does. Break the sentences that all start with you. Then ask one honest reader whether they wanted to stop, and believe the answer.
And accept that some readers will find you arrogant regardless. A minority decide that about anyone who describes doing something difficult. You cannot write around them without writing a book that says nothing. That’s a real cost for a very small return.
What surprises people
Here’s what I’ve noticed across these projects. The authors most worried about sounding boastful are, almost without exception, the ones whose manuscripts are fine.
The genuinely self-absorbed client never raises it. He’s not anxious about how he comes across, because he’s confident he comes across well, and I’m the one raising it with him, chapter after chapter, asking what the reader gets out of a passage that exists to flatter its subject.
So if you’re lying awake wondering whether your book is too much about you, that worry tells you something about your character and nothing about your manuscript. Take it seriously enough to run the test. Then stop letting it cut the material that makes the book worth reading.
For how the interviews behind this work, start at my ghostwriting hub. If you want somebody to handle the whole thing, that’s what my ghostwriting service is for.