Author Type #6: Elite Sports Performer

You are very, very good at what you do. 

Whether you are an ultra-athlete or the master of an intellectual game, you are an achiever. Your competition may only be yourself, but you have used your journey to gain insight and wisdom into human capacity. Your story can take the reader behind the curtain into a world that is both fascinating and little-understood.

There is something different about the people who are the very best at what they do, and I am fascinated by that. Many readers share this fascination—that’s why we obsess over sports. The difference is that I sometimes get the chance to spend a lot of quality time with one of these individuals when they tell their story.

I’m ghostwriting a memoir now with one such person, an individual who is ranked consistently in the top five globally in their event. 

When I work with an author like this, I want to get under the hood. 

What drives them? These are people who are used to giving interviews—my job is to go much deeper than they are accustomed to going, to ask them questions they haven’t been asked, to get them uncomfortable with their vulnerability. That’s a challenge, because they’ve spent a lifetime knowing themselves and their minds. Ultimately, elite performance is a mental achievement regardless of your sport or event; I try to get inside the iron cage that is their mind and describe what I find there.

For me, it’s a blast. If I do my job right, readers understand who these people are better than they did before. They get a look behind the curtain, not only at what that individual has been through on their journey, but also at how they got through it in a way that drove them to their success. That success comes at a cost, and I want the reader to see that, too. 

In other words, I want to show them not simply as performers, but as humans.

Success for these authors doesn’t mean fame or money—they’ve got that. It means being seen fully for who they are. Andre Agassiz’s Open is a great example of this. So is Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike (whatever you think of Lance, it was a great book …)