What Becoming Fluent in a Foreign Language Taught Me About Ghostwriting

Eight years ago, I moved to Latvia to live with my wife (then-girlfriend) and try to build a career as a professional musician.

My Latvian language skills were limited. I had taken a six-week intensive course, which gave me some grammar fundamentals, but I couldn’t sustain a conversation. I could confidently order a coffee in a cafe, but as soon as they asked if I wanted it for takeaway or not (“uz vietas vai līdzi?”), I froze.

Today, I’m fluent. I’ve got the exam results to prove it.

Learning a foreign language — truly learning it enough to read the news, write emails, and crack jokes with friends — is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. It’s painstaking, and it requires a specific kind of patience and focus to be successful.?

Of course, being able to speak to my friends and neighbors in their native language is itself a reward. But over the last few years of writing thought leadership for tech executives (a career I developed alongside working as a choral musician in Riga), I’ve found that my language-learning experience has proven to be a huge asset.

Here’s what I learned and how you can apply it to your thought leadership writing — no Latvian lessons required.

Humility is a ghostwriter’s secret weapon

What’s a former honors student’s biggest fear? Being wrong in public.

What is everyone writing content in 2023? A former honors student. (I’m generalizing, but am I really?)

Before I moved to Latvia, I was paralyzed by the fear of being wrong, having someone recognize it, and being thought of as stupid. If I was out of my depth in a conversation, I’d clam up rather than ask questions that would have helped me understand.

When you’re thrown in the deep end in a foreign country, you get over that fear quickly. There’s simply no way to make progress if you’re not willing to be wrong, and wrong often.

When you’re writing thought leadership, your role is to take the knowledge that’s in the executive’s head and translate it so that a less knowledgeable audience can understand and appreciate it. You have to go through the uncomfortable process of learning about something you previously didn’t understand; only then can you explain it to someone else.

I’ve now been in literally hundreds of conversations where I didn’t understand what was being said and had to ask for help. What’s one more, even if it means asking the CEO of a company what a specific acronym stands for?

Stay humble. Recognize that the most important outcome from your conversations with an executive should be learning. You don’t need to impress them in the moment with your knowledge and insights; you can do that later with your writing.

Fake it ‘til you make it — within reason

Asking questions is important, but there’s a balance. If I asked my conversation partners to define every Latvian word I didn’t understand, I would quickly have lost the few friends I had. Knowing when to fake comprehension is a fine art — nod along, keep the conversation moving, see if you can find a new point on which to anchor yourself.

The same principle applies to thought leadership interviews. There could be a moment when you stumble on a technical term in the middle of an otherwise fascinating train of thought. Smile, nod, make a note to look that term up later. Likewise, you may not know where they’re going at the beginning of a particular story — give yourself a little extra time to see if they take it into more familiar territory. These moments of pause often result in the most valuable content for thought leadership pieces. Of course, there are limits to the “fake it ‘til you make it” strategy. Experts can pretty quickly tell when someone isn’t able to carry their weight, and nothing damages a client relationship more than giving off the impression that you’re underqualified.?

It’s a delicate balance. You can nod along just enough to see if you end up hitting on something valuable, but if you try to fake expertise for too long, you’ll commit the single most dangerous sin in writing thought leadership — wasting the executive’s time.

Attack the stumbling blocks

After I had made some progress in Latvian, there was one concept that I couldn’t get past: prepositions. On, around, next to, before — I couldn’t keep them straight or understand the grammar.

I had hoped that I would simply figure prepositions out in the course of talking to people and living in Latvia, but it turned out they were a serious stumbling block. If I was going to become fluent, I would have to attack this particular topic head-on.

In every thought leadership client relationship, you’re going to come across a stumbling block — the topic that you can’t figure out how to effectively communicate in your content. It won’t always be a complicated technical subject; sometimes it’s simply a value proposition that the company has a hard time selling to its potential customers.?

These stumbling blocks are why you were hired, and they’re what separates decent ghostwriters from trusted, indispensable consultants. Just like I had to dive headfirst into prepositions and study, study, study until I knew them backwards and forwards, you’ll need to spend an outsized amount of time trying to figure out how to distill a thought leadership stumbling block into the perfect 800-word byline. It will be tempting to put it off and to write about other topics, but the sooner you attack the challenge, the sooner you’ll prove your unassailable worth to the client.