How I Channeled My Fear and Anxiety To Get My First Ghostwriting Job
Why standing on the edge is terrifying, but the rewards can be…
It was the perfect summer day. We started with a perfect cup of coffee, packed up the car and headed south from Los Angeles headed towards San Diego. I had my girlfriend by my side and everything was in its right order. It was a Sunday. There wasn't a care in the world.
We were on our way to San Diego to meet with my friend and join him and his wife to see the Chicago Cubs face off against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park. My friend and I both grew up in Chicago so obviously we were there for the Cubbies.
We went to a local bar before hand to grab a drink and loosen ourselves up before the game. My friend, Chad and I hadn't seen one another in quite some time. We had a decent amount of time spent apart to catch up on.
I started first asking him about how his marriage was doing, how his new puppy was and how he was enjoying his new job. He told me everything was good — especially the job. He then put the conversation back on me — how were things with my girl friend, how was my job and how things were going with my blog.
I told him about how well my girl and I were doing, the up's and down's with the job and how positively invested I was with myself and my writing.
This prompted a question from Chad that I didn't see coming…
"So your writing and blogging is going so well, my company is looking for a ghostwriter, would you be interested in doing freelance work for us?"
As I took a sip of my tiki-cocktail, I almost coughed it all back up. The anxieties of feeling like a fraud were firing off in my head.
Freelance work? Shit… I wasn't ready for anything like this. All the writing I do is on my watch, I haven't ever been contingent on a client. Oh God, I'm finally going to be ousted as a fake. The dam had been cracking and now it's finally going to burst wide open. I'm done.
After what seemed like an hour of self-contemplation, I replied to Chad was a overly confident, "Hell yes!"
On the outside I was trying to exude confidence. On the inside I was shaking like a scared little boy.
- I knew nothing about this company.
- I had never done ghostwriting before.
- I had never been commissioned for my writing.
- I've always felt my writing is less than it could be (perhaps a symptom all writers feel).
But I accepted the challenge head on.
When we finally entered the park to enjoy a few hours of America's Past time, we didn't bring up the topic any further. As we purchased a few more drinks, I figured the conversation was just a friendly small-talk, but never-going-to-deliver proposal. You know those times you are talking with your friends about an idea and then no one actual executes on the idea and it finds itself withered away through the passage of time?
Yeah…I thought this was going to be the same.
After the game was over, my girlfriend and I left to go back to our lives in LA.
I could breathe again. Everything was back in place and I could go back to being safe, tucked away from the responsibility of being a professional writer.
I woke that Monday morning to a text from Chad,
Still want to ghostwrite?
Okay — so there was no getting off the hook with this one. After confirming that I was interested, within minutes I was put on a 3-way email chain with his point of contact with the company for ghostwriting. He wanted me to send him some previous work from my portfolio.
Portfolio?
Shit. I didn't have anything like that!
Enter Medium — my saving grace. Luckily, I had been writing on Medium for about a year. This was my portfolio. I sent this contact an email with 15 links to previous work that I had done (yeah…for sure overkill). He said he liked my work and that we could do a trial run article.
He sent me over an outline and I got to work. I slammed away on the keys. I built up arguments and backed them up with ample evidence. I went above and beyond with the product I was going to deliver. After a couple of hours I sent over my piece.
Within an hour I got a text message from my friend Chad, "Haha, your article is good. Ray really likes it. The only thing is, it's WAY too long." A bit later after than, I got a similar email from the contact, Ray. He was looking for a 750 word blog post and I provided him with 2,100.
A good problem nonetheless.
After some editing, I was able to chop down the article to about 900 words. Still above the requirement but I told Ray that I didn't want to sacrifice on quality and weakening the arguments presented. He obliged.
Ray told me about his processes with freelancers: the article is submitted and then goes through a series of 3 revisions, each revision has comments submitted by their team and then I am responsible for the subsequent edits. A drastic step in my formal processes with writing for sure.
After the first revision, I got a notice on my smart phone from my Paypal account:
"PayPal: You were paid $100 by Ray…"
I 👏 Fucking 👏 Did 👏 It!
I was officially a paid ghostwriter.
The process and the anxieties involved with the whole experience were real and transformative. I realized in that moment, "I can do this."
So often I see on sites like Medium people gaining exponential amounts of success. I feel overwhelmed at times.
They have their writing degree, they have their Forbes column, they have their 35k+ followers and here I am — writing because I love to write. I don't have any pedigree or professional background. But I do love to write.
I find it amazing what can happen when you just put your head down and do the work that could turn into something great.
For over a year, I wasn't writing for anyone really but myself. I was writing and publishing my work because it felt great and I loved doing it.
I loved exploring the caverns of my own mind.
What did all of this turn into? An opportunity to take an industrious responsibility for my writing. This to me is an amazing opportunity. Of course I had to mask my insecurities and anxieties with being revealed as a fraud — so far, so good and I've started to tell myself that I'm far from a fraud.
I do something because I love doing it. The practice is making me better and the skill is now translating into real value in the real world.
I keep in the back of my mind something the CEO of a company I used to work at once said. During a round table meet-and-greet we were able to ask this guy a question. Most people wanted to know about his likes and dislikes, his hobbies etc. I wanted to know about how he got to the position he was in. I asked him, "What advice would have and be willing to relay to a young, 23 year old professional like me who is looking to progress rapidly in life?" (I was 23 at the time). He responded with, and I'll never forget it,
"Well I'm in this position right now because I put myself in situations where I feel uncomfortable and am unsure of what my success with be. To tell you the truth — I've never been a CEO, this is unfamiliar territory. Put yourself in unfamiliar territory and see what you're made of."
I applied that principle to ghostwriting and so far, it's opened doors I didn't know existed.
👋🏻Hey there — I’m Jon
I’m a thinker, freelance ghostwriter and wine lover who writes articles about personal growth and psychological optimization. Join over 1,200 readers getting my FREE Personal 6 day “Entre-Blogging” Course and my ongoing newsletters:
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