A Mutual Hug
A greeting of a welcomed warm hug conveys a deep connection. The people hugging may have a history going back decades or have recently met and experienced an instant affinity and common ground. It can mean love, respect, joy, and the assurance that each person as the recipient is essential and validated.
As a legacy business memoir author, you want to reach out to your ideal readers and tell them your story. If your ideal reader is someone in your industry, you want to tell your story to benefit them. After reading your book, your readers will be informed, inspired, and confident about their next steps. They may want to read your book to gain wisdom or confidence.
As the author, by setting the stage for your entrepreneurial journey at the beginning of your book, you engage your reader with your dream, pathos, risks, and challenges. They understand your vision and why you were driven to persevere despite obstacles. Even though your readers might not have been on the journey with you, you are leading them through a connection of mutual understanding. Your readers gratefully take this journey with you because you have been there before them. Life, by default, gives you authority.
You will tell your reader stories about when you lost the financing for a project, found it through different sources, and sustained that relationship over your career. You will tell them about a disruptor in your industry and that you had to start at square one to remain competitive, but this time bringing in all your complex hard-won knowledge. You will tell them about the time you chose to put your family first, lost a client, and were fired, and that then set you on a path where you call the shots and are still doing so today. Your readers will listen. They pay attention to what you did and did not do and how you felt. They will honor your journey and embark on one of their own.
If your ideal reader is your family, you will want to tell them about the ups and downs of building and marketing your business for decades and your vision that sustained through the tumult. They will remember the stories you tell. You want your words to convey warmth.
Your family will read stories about family gatherings at the cherished dining room table passed down from Aunt Joan. They will love remembering or hearing about the board voting on an acquisition. A generation later, when those seated at the boardroom table are gone or retired, you will offer strength and continuity to the next generation or the generation to come. Even if your business dissolves, your journey will remain because you took the time to write your book, and your family readers will be appreciative that you took the journey and told them about it.
Either way, you want to envelop your reader with care and compassion. They are taking the time to read your book. You want them to feel that you care enough about them to write this book for them or, in the case of family, to write it for future generations.
Your story encompasses what readers see, understand, and wish to learn from your unique perspective. A path is illuminated for them to take a chance, take a risk, or see a vision for their business. Your reader's sense of self is stronger and more assured because you came before them. You trust them with your story; they will carry on however they see fit.
Your readers will benefit from your expertise and experience. They will want to honor you and thank you. Their hug back to you, the author, is an assurance that they will not forget. It is a thank you for trusting them with your story. Thank you for trusting that they will know what to do next. They will remember you because they have internalized your messages. In the world of legacy memoirs, every story is a warm hug. Every book l transcends time and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.
Have you had a vision? Why did you create something from nothing? You figured it out with grace and grit and kept it going for as long as possible. As entrepreneurs, we tell our stories to inspire our readers to create and tell their own stories. It is a mutual hug between the author and reader that says I honor and will not forget you.