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Life is Not a Box of Chocolates

If you’re looking for a ghostwriter, you’re rarely just looking for words but for someone who can hold your truth, shape it, and still keep the heartbeat together with your voice, neatly and intact. In my work as a biography and memoir ghostwriter, I’ve spent years listening to the private stories behind the public success—entrepreneurs, celebrities, survivors, leaders…This post is about the patterns I’ve seen.

I’ve always disagreed with Forrest Gump’s line: “Life is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re gonna get.” A box of chocolates usually comes with a little menu. You can see whether you’re biting into strawberry cream or fudge. There are, in other words, no surprises other than that of quality.

Life, on the other hand, has no menu, certainly not instructions, and it often doesn’t come with parents willing—or able enough—to be role models, who offer advice and direction in any way that provides help in the real world. Quite often, in fact, the people I work with who’ve lived the most interesting, adventurous lives have had to figure it out for themselves—and, ultimately, it has served them rather well.

Because while life requires endless leaps of faith, and the tenacity to walk along unknown paths as if blindfolded, there’s also something strangely fixed about it, that is, the structure of life—societal systems, the archetypes of human existence—all can feel remarkably immutable. To rebels without a cause, and to anarchists, this probably doesn’t sit that well. Yet for those who are savvy—those who understand that society is a sloth of a beast and slow to change—there are ways to make the whole construct work for you, or if fortunate, to instigate change. A myriad of ways exist to overcome obstacles. In turn, new paths are forged. Improbably virgin ideas brought to fruition. Though not without some alternate solutions.

I’m mostly talking here about the entrepreneurs, inventors and creators. The people who keep moving in the face of dead ends and no-you-can’ts and the never-ending chorus of naysayers. The ones whose vision is strong enough to outlast the status quo.

It’s such people who are often gifted to me as clients.

I’ve worked, for example, with someone who lost his father at five and grew up with a mother who sometimes had one shilling spare at the end of the month—often not even that—yet went on to be awarded an OBE for military services. Or a Syrian businessman who became one of the UK’s leading industrialists. Or a man who saw his mother murdered and still found himself later advising MPs.

And then there’s the emotional toll that comes with later life: the businesswoman who survived war and near-refugee status and was awarded Businesswoman of the Year in a country not her own; the international interior designer who survived a psychopathic mind’s games played upon her and her children and went from abject poverty to owning three homes. It is no small feat to endure great trauma. But it is an even greater feat to go on and succeed.

These people entrance me—not merely because of what they’ve done, impressive as it is—but because of the selectivity of their minds and the power of their presence. The power, in short, of their soul.

One thing I encounter again and again is this: they are fully present in our time together. No frequent phone checks. No losing the thread. No skirting around delicate subjects. They are open, direct, and—more often than not—fearless. And I suspect this isn’t confined to a conversation about a book. I suspect it’s how they conduct their lives.

They sit, after all, in the only real power any of us have: the present moment.

They aren’t living far off in the future. Yes, there may be some five- or ten-year plan (often there is), but experience has taught them something more valuable than planning: adaptability. Responding to what is.

As another great man said a century or so earlier: adaptation enhances survival. And what is success, really, other than a kind of affirmation that one has become very good at surviving?

So no—life may not be like a box of chocolates in the way Forrest Gump meant it. But perhaps it is like a more familiar chocolate box: not one that tells you what you’re going to get, but one that reminds you what matters; that there is choice. That the payoffs can be sublime.

All we really have is now—and the presence of mind to meet what’s in front of us with calm confidence, maintaining a stoical front. Life is always some blend of destiny and chance. And enhancing both—if that’s even the right phrase—means being awake to the present.

If you’re considering working with a ghostwriter, I’m happy to hear a little about your project—details on this website.