Hopefully it hasn’t escaped your attention, but I put out a ton of content.
I post an article on my website every day of the week. I’ve been doing so for nearly two years.
I also send out another exclusive article to my email subscriber list. 99.9% of the time I ensure this article is an original—otherwise it wouldn’t be fair on subscribers.
Further to this I Tweet on an hourly basis.
I write and record a weekly podcast.
And then I write long-form content—books. I have now written and published ten books (including, most recently, Relentless Productivity, which I will send you for free when you sign up to my mail list here, and drop me a quick email request).
And just recently I wrote and produced an 8-hour course – Personal Brand Mastery.
That’s a lot of content. Sometimes, people are surprised. Sometimes they ask me, ‘Troy, how do you think of things to write about every day?’
Well, firstly, let me explain why I write and publish content every day. Principally, it’s to build my audience (and therefore my influence and ultimately my income). Because every single article that I put out (and they can go out on various platforms, such as Medium and LinkedIn etc) is one more opportunity for a new reader to discover me.
An audience is built one person at a time. And in my view it makes sense to give them as many doors to walk through as you possibly can.
An article, or a story—that’s a door
The other thing is personal pride (with probably a rather large dose of addictiveness). I once read a biography of David Foster Wallace. Apparently Wallace said ‘you’re not a real writer until you’ve written 50 stories’. I once read a well-known blogger say ‘if you’re not writing and publishing every day then you’re not a real writer’.
Well, I want to be a ‘real’ writer. And so I will follow the prescripts of these two men who I don’t know (and one of whom is dead) until I fall down dead myself.
Only joking. I mainly do it for the audience-building thing. But I’ll readily admit there’s more that a hint of compulsiveness in my process.
Anyway. How do I think of things to write everyday?
Really, it’s pretty simple.
Actually, it seems harder to imagine not having things to write about everyday.
Apparently the average person has 50,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day.
That’s 35 – 48 thoughts per minute.
We think a hell of a lot of thoughts, guys. And any number of those thoughts (or combinations thereof) might be worthy of developing.
Might be worthy of untangling, assessing or reassessing, or simply of laying out in an organised manner for other people to consider.
(Of course, some of them are probably better of leaving just as thoughts! But that’s another matter…!)
As with every other area of life, I choose to live in abundance rather than its opposite. And in the case of ideas, I see that they are (practically) infinite. So the problem is less ‘finding things to write about’ than it is ‘narrowing down what I’m going to write about to make the sheer volume manageable’.
The way you do that is very simple. You have pre-determined ‘areas of interest’ that help you decide what you will cover and what you won’t.
For me, for example, my areas of interest are: relationships and dating, personal development, addiction and mental health, entrepreneurship, online business, writing, and personal memoir.
Anything I’ve written about over the past few years has fallen into one of those categories.
Now, it’s a pretty broad spread. And that’s good. Because it means that I can switch genres as and when I start to tire of one.
But it’s not an infinite spread. Here are just a few of the topics that aren’t on my life: fitness, cooking, diet, embroidery, and quantum physics.
That’s not to say that I would never want to write about any of those things. But my areas of interest keep me focussed. And so every day, when I think about what I’m going to write, I consider how it can feed into one of my topics—how it can help illuminate, elucidate or explain. Or, more simply, how it might entertain.
And that, really, is what it comes down to. Recognising that ideas are limitless. That if you sat down at a keyboard now and were forced to write about whatever was in your head, I guarantee you could do it. And there’s a decent chance that the resulting work would be pretty good.
What is arguably more important than inspiration is figuring out how each random idea can fit in with your areas of interest. But that, too, is straightforward—all it takes is a little thought. And if you really can’t see how a particular topic relates back to your core subject matter then perhaps it’s not something you should be writing about after all.
A point: when you set yourself the challenge of writing everyday you will rise to it. I used to write one article about dating a week. I was worried when I decided to 7X that—how the hell would I do it?
I needn’t have been concerned. The surprising thing is that the more you create, the more the creative fire will burn in you, and the more ideas will come. In short, if you want to write more then write more. It gets progressively easier over time.
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