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.