Everything is Content 📱

Credit: Augusto Zambonato

Everything we do at work is content. Every email you send to a client, every social media post, every presentation you make, every pitch proposal done - each of these were pieces of content that 1) You had to create 2) Needed to effectively produce results 3) contain some element of novelty or creativity in them, no matter how routine they may seem.

++ Insight:
Any modern piece of work is never created from scratch.
It’s assembled.

Modern work has become so complex and multi-disciplinary that we virtually never sit down to create from scratch. We start by assembling building blocks from a repository of things we already have or can appropriate from others; and only then are we ready to begin putting them together.

When creating a new presentation, we might take reference from a similar powerpoint used from a past project or leverage on a framework used in another proposal and adapt it to the task at hand.

That’s because no idea, concept or model is entirely new. Most forms of creativity and innovation are combinational - An idea is nothing but two or more seemingly unrelated things put together to form something new and interesting.

The capacity to take existing concepts and use them to create new combinations largely depends on our ability to see relationships between concepts. This requires 1. A fascination with a wide range of concept 2. an ability to quickly learn, synthesise and understand 3. A way to archive and retrieve relevant information when searching for relationships between facts.

If we are going to be creating content for the foreseeable future, it would make sense to build a content pipeline; a place to store and organise these building blocks.

"Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them." - David Allen

School has taught us to memorise facts and regurgitate them in tests and exams. That is a bad habit to develop because our brains should be used to generate ideas, not holding them.

Like a staging area for ideas, we need a trusted place outside our brain where the accumulated sum of our past thinking + the thinking we learn from others, can be laid out, organised and be prepared for use.

Living in a curious way and having a system to archive and retrieve information you have consumed will ensure that you will never run out of content or ideas. The more accumulated knowledge you have about the world, the more opportunities you will have for creating new relationships and connections between ideas.