Step 2: Extract Key Ideas

A week later, Darren sat at his kitchen table with a strong cup of coffee and a wall of sticky notes in front of him. He’d followed through on his commitment. He’d pulled content from podcast transcripts, coaching calls, and random late-night brainstorms buried in his Notes app. The table looked like the aftermath of a creative explosion. At first glance, it was chaos.

But something started to shift.

As Darren read through the fragments, he began noticing themes. Clients kept asking the same three questions. His old blog posts circled around five core ideas. One keynote he’d nearly scrapped turned out to have sparked several spin-off concepts that were still showing up in DMs a year later. He scribbled arrows, drew boxes, and whispered to himself, “There’s something here.” What once felt like content clutter was starting to resemble a trail. It was proof that he’d been saying something meaningful all along.

Still, doubt crept in. Was he just recycling the same ideas over and over? Was this boring? Would his audience notice?

But then he remembered something a mentor once said: “Repetition builds trust. Clarity builds authority.” Darren wasn’t repeating himself. He was reinforcing the message people needed to hear, just in different ways. That insight landed hard. It gave him the confidence to stop chasing new ideas and start refining the ones that had already made an impact. By the end of that weekend, Darren had outlined five content pillars, tagged dozens of ideas with sticky labels, and color-coded the ones that aligned with his offers. He hadn’t published anything new yet. But for the first time in months, he saw the shape of his message. The fog was lifting.

Step 1: Review & Reflect

Darren stared at the blinking cursor on his screen, his desktop littered with half-started folders. One was labeled “Podcast Clips,” another “Webinar Notes,” and a third, “June Ideas (Old?)” hadn’t been opened since March. Every time he sat down to create something new, he felt like he was either repeating himself or reinventing the wheel. The ideas were there, he knew that, but they were buried under digital clutter and mental fatigue.

He had always been a big believer in content. It had helped build his consulting business and made him “the guy” people turned to when they needed to make sense of complex tech. But somewhere along the way, content creation stopped feeling creative. It had become a burden, a box to check off. Publish a post. Film a quick reel. Write a newsletter. Check, check, check. Yet none of it seemed to move the needle anymore.

Reality Hits

One night, after skipping dinner and snapping at his partner over something trivial, Darren sat on the couch and opened the Notes app on his phone. He just typed: “What am I even doing with all this content?” It was an honest question, not just about strategy. But it was about purpose, about energy, and about whether this work still felt like his. He scrolled through old client call transcripts, random voice memos, and screenshots of past slide decks. There were nuggets of brilliance hidden in plain sight. But it felt like finding diamonds in a landfill.

Time To Do Something Different

That weekend, he blocked off two hours, not to create, but to review. No new tools. No strategy rabbit holes. Just him, a notebook, and what he already had. He printed out three blog posts from last year that still made him proud. He listened to a recorded Zoom session with a past client and found himself nodding along to his own advice. For the first time in a long while, Darren didn’t feel behind. He felt… anchored. The gold wasn’t gone. It was just buried under the noise. That moment changed everything, not in an explosive, dramatic way, but in a quiet, grounding one. He realized he didn’t need more content. He needed to see his content differently. It wasn’t about producing. It was about rediscovering. That insight lit a small fire, the kind that doesn’t flare up fast, but keeps burning.

Darren Cole hadn’t always felt this scattered. Years ago, when he left his role as a senior tech consultant to help other experts productize their knowledge, everything felt aligned. He had clarity. Drive. A mission. But over time, that clarity dissolved into chaos. His desktop was a maze of half-finished ideas. His notes app had more “drafts” than he cared to admit. And his content? Buried in forgotten folders and old cloud drives, most of it never shared.

At first, Darren thought it was just a busy season. But months passed, and the noise only grew louder. Every time he sat down to write a newsletter or prep a talk, he felt paralyzed. It wasn’t that he didn’t have ideas. He had too many. Ideas from client calls. Ideas scribbled on napkins. Voice memos recorded mid-commute. He felt like he was drowning in content but starving for traction. For someone who taught systems thinking, his own content process was painfully unsystematic.

Darren started questioning himself. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of visibility. He thought the market was too noisy. He wondered people didn’t really want what he offered. These doubts crept in quietly but stuck around like fog. Even his close friends noticed he was showing up less online. His once-consistent presence had turned into sporadic bursts followed by long silences. The guilt of “not doing enough” weighed on him, even when he was working overtime.

The tipping point came on a Tuesday morning. Darren opened his email and realized he had missed replying to three podcast invitations—two of them from people he admired. They’d been sitting in his inbox for weeks, unread. Buried under promotions and flagged tasks. That was the moment he knew: he wasn’t just disorganized. He was disconnected—from his message, his audience, and even himself.

He needed a way out. Not another tool. Not another planner or template. He needed a clear, sustainable path forward. A way to bring order to the chaos, reconnect with his purpose, and finally build a system that worked with his brain, not against it.