Everyone deserves a record of their life. Even you.

I'm not a writer, so I'll keep this simple. But I've come to believe something, and I want to talk you into it: everyone should have a record of their life. Not just presidents and founders and people with Wikipedia pages. You. Your mom. The guy who fixed your car for twenty years.

I didn't always think this. It came from a hole in my own life.

My mother died when I was four. I have no real memory of her — a couple of photos, and the careful, vague things relatives tell a kid. I don't know what made her laugh. I don't know what she worried about. There's a whole person I came from, and to me she's basically a blank.

My dad I had until about ten years ago, so I figured he was covered. Then my teenage son asked me what his grandfather was like. I opened my mouth and not much came out — a few facts, a couple of stories I'd told so often they'd gone flat. I had decades with the man, and I couldn't give my own kid a real sense of who he was.

That's when it hit me: we lose people twice. Once when they die, and then again, slowly, as their stories fade because nobody wrote them down.

"But I'm not interesting"

Whenever I bring this up, someone tells me their life isn't interesting enough for a book. I get it. But I spent years valuing companies for a living — working out what something is really worth versus what people assume it's worth — and an ordinary person's own life might be the most underpriced thing I know of.

Think of someone you've lost. Imagine an hour of them just talking — about their day, their childhood, some dumb argument with their brother in 1974. You wouldn't care whether it was interesting. You'd care that it was them.

Nobody wants the polished version of you. Your kids don't need your résumé. They want to know what you sounded like telling a story, what you believed, what you were like at their age. It all feels ordinary to you because it's yours. To the people who love you, it's the whole thing.

Why almost nobody does it

Until pretty recently, leaving a record was hard. You either sat down and wrote it yourself — which most people never will — or paid someone thousands of dollars to do it for you. So it quietly became a luxury. The famous got memoirs; everyone else got a shoebox of photos and a few stories told to a four-year-old.

That part has changed now, and it's why I built what I built. But that's for another post.

For now I just want to leave you with the idea. There should be something out there about you, from you, that the people who love you can find when you're not around to ask. Not because you're a big deal. Because you're theirs.

— Jeff

Why I built MemoirTalk →