If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?
Years ago, when I was working in a church, I wrote a course on how to write your life story.
It was really just meant to be a community service. I thought we might get half a dozen people. We did a letterbox drop around the local suburb and were completely inundated with interest. So we ran the course again the next year. And again after that.
Over the next few years, about 120 people took part, all from the local area. Many went on to write their life stories or begin other writing projects. A continuing writers’ group also grew out of it and, remarkably, it is still meeting every month 15 years later.
So if I could start a new business now, I think I would go back to that idea. I would love to set up a “life story” business. Not really to make money, but to help people find the confidence, encouragement and practical help they need to get their story down on paper for their families.
My parents did that as a result of the course, and I am very glad they did. Their stories have become an invaluable record for our wider family as they approach the final years of their lives. There are things in those pages that would otherwise have disappeared. Stories from childhood. Family memories. Work. Relationships. Hard times. Funny moments. Ordinary things that probably did not seem very important at the time, but now matter enormously.
We are quite good at preserving possessions. We keep photographs. We hold onto furniture, letters, jewellery and family homes. But sometimes we forget to preserve the stories that give those things meaning. A photograph tells you who was there. A story tells you why the day mattered. A house tells you where someone lived. A story tells you what happened around the kitchen table.
Of course, not everyone feels able to write their own story. Some people do not know where to begin. Others may not have the confidence or energy to take on a big writing project.
For them, I would love to sit down, listen, ask questions and turn those memories into a short memoir for their family. It would not need to be a grand autobiography. Most lives are not grand. But that does not make them unimportant.
In fact, it is often the ordinary things that families treasure most later: where someone grew up, how they met their partner, what work was like, what they worried about, what made them laugh, what they believed, what they learned along the way.
Perhaps that would be my business. Helping people preserve not just what they owned, but something of who they were. Because possessions tell us that someone lived. Stories help us understand how they lived.
If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?
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