83. How to become a content machine

A friend once asked whether I secretly have an army of content producers behind me. After all, how else could one person put out that much?

Of course, I don't. The thing that produces all of it isn't extraordinary talent, or having a ton of time.

It's a specific way I choose to think about myself. And you can adopt the same mindset.

This is a re-release from 2019, the fifth episode of my very first podcast ever, and everything in it is still exactly how I work, and exactly what I'd recommend.

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I’m Simone Grace Seol. Let me help you build community care, social responsibility, and spirituality into every part of your business.

📩 My emails — my most intimate writing, sent in real time: simonegraceseol.com/get-emails

📷 Instagram — @simone.grace.seol

Transcript

Hey, this is Simone. Are you ready for a podcast episode from 2019? I'm bringing back some episodes from my archived podcast that I think very much stand the test of time — just as useful now as they were back then. You're gonna hear me talk about how to become a beast of a content creator on social media, and guess what? Everything I'm saying here in 2019 — I believe this was the fifth episode of my very first podcast ever — is still true. I'm still doing these things. This is still the best advice I would give to anyone who wants to free up their capacity to create and share.

And you have the added benefit of being able to spy on what my business was like, where my brain was back in 2019 when my business was like a toddler. So that's fun. So I hope you listen and enjoy.

Do you secretly have an army of content producers?

It was so funny the other day. A friend of mine who belongs to my Facebook group, Fearless on Facebook, commented, "Simone, do you secretly have an army of content producers behind you? How in the actual fuck do you produce so much incredible high-value content? This is epic."

So how do I do this thing where people are secretly suspecting that I have an army of content producers behind me who are actually producing amazing output, right? Because I don't mind saying that all of my stuff — every piece of copy I write, everything I offer — there's no fluff. Everything is super packed with what I see as really life-changing, provocative, useful nuggets of information. So how do I do that?

And I thought about it, and here's what I told him: "If you think the way I do, you can also look as though you have an army of content producers behind you, too." It's just a question of how you're thinking about creating, and how you think about sharing. So I thought it'd be useful today to share with you how I choose to think, so that you know you have those options too — because we can all choose our thoughts. We can choose to think in the way that serves us.

I value the contents of my own brain

So here's the first thought that I have: I value the contents of my brain so much that I rarely hold back from sharing. When I say I value the contents of my own brain, it means I trust that they're interesting. I trust that they're useful. If something is useful to me, I trust that it'll be useful to other people. When I put two ideas together that seem fresh and interesting to me, it's like, "Oh, you wouldn't have thought to put these two ideas together."

So let's say, as an example — I think that the golden rule applies to social media in a weird way. You know how the golden rule is, do unto others as you would have them do unto you? I feel like: do unto social media as you would have social media do unto you. Which is to say, if you want social media to be a more decent, and humane, and human, and loving, and kind place, then those are the qualities that you should bring to social media. If you want social media to be less formulaic, and more original, and more authentic, then how about you bring the originality, and the creativity, and humanity, and authenticity to social media?

So I would have thoughts like that. It's just two ideas that I put together that make sense to me, and that's interesting to me. So when I have a thought like that — for a long time, I used to think, "Oh, well, that's probably stupid," or, "It isn't stupid, but nobody's gonna care." And I trained my brain to think that no, they probably do care. Not everybody in the world, but if it's interesting to me, it's probably interesting to somebody else.

So I don't just let that thought slip away. I write it down, or I record it on my voice memos app on my iPhone. And the recording, the putting it down on paper or typing it up — that action comes from my thought that this is worth writing down. This is worth recording.

And the thing is, I don't think there are people who have great ideas and other people who don't. I don't think I just magically have better ideas than everybody else. I think I practice trusting that my ideas are valuable, so the more ideas I have, the more I write them down. And the more I write them down, the more ideas I somehow have. It's almost as though the act of me valuing my own ideas makes me have better ideas. I hope that makes sense.

I actually think it works the same way for everybody. I see so many brilliant, creative people who devalue their own thoughts, who devalue their own originality and think, "Oh, well, this is slightly unorthodox, so nobody cares. People are gonna not like it." Or, "If it's not unorthodox, then everybody has the same thoughts, so why bother? It's probably useless." In every case, how highly you think of the contents of your own brain is up to you. You could really just decide, "Hey, there's some good shit that comes out of my brain." Right?

Never letting a moment of inspiration evaporate

Another thing that I do — well, I already told you I'm always recording, always writing down my thoughts. Literally, I'll be driving my car, and if I have an idea I really want to write down, it's like, "Oh, this is good. I have to write this down." I'll sometimes pull over and just type it up on my phone, or record it onto my voice memos app. And even if I'm in the middle of a conversation with somebody else, I'll say, "Wait, wait, wait. Can you just hold on a sec? I just have to write this down." I don't do that very often in the middle of a conversation, but I will often stop what I'm doing to take them down. Ideas are always floating. Never letting a moment of inspiration evaporate.

Constraining the output

All right, here's another thing that I do. As you can tell, I'm somebody who lets my brain go to, like, a million places. I have a lot of interests. I'm really ADD — in a good way. I chose to think that it's a good thing that I have ADD, because I have this very interdisciplinary, wide-ranging, flexible, agile mind. That's how I reframe my ADHD to myself.

So as you can probably tell, I have like a million ideas a day, and if I went chasing after every single one of them, I could never get anything done. So what I do is, I let myself come up with as many ideas as I want, and then when it comes to sharing, I constrain it down. I look at my output and I separate the wheat from the chaff — and not wheat and chaff as in some ideas are good and others are bad. It's just: which of these is gonna be really useful for my people? Which of these is gonna make a really positive difference for my people?

So I kind of focus it once I have it all. Or maybe it's something I already wrote — I had an idea, but I just need to tweak and edit it a little bit so it becomes really consumable content. It's like picking a really delicious raw ingredient and then arranging it a certain way on a plate, or putting some basic seasoning on it, or stir-frying it really quickly to preserve the original flavor but make it a lot more edible. Does that make sense? That's a weird metaphor. Sorry.

So I do that. Once I have all this output, then I constrain it, then I focus it: "This is gonna be interesting to my people. This is gonna be useful."

My ideas are worth packaging

And here's the final thing that I do, which is really fun: I decide that my ideas are worth packaging, worth following, and worth a lot of money. I chose to believe all of these things. Nobody told me. It's not like I had a ton of proof when I decided to believe this.

I decided to believe that my ideas are just worth packaging. And by packaging, what I mean is — I've already revealed that I wrote my first book by culling from my Facebook posts that I'd posted over the span of a year. I cherry-picked the posts that had, you know, 20 or 30 likes or more, literally from Facebook. I gathered them all — there's quite a number of them. I edited them a little bit. Boom, I had a book. And let me tell you, I'm really proud of my book. I love my book, and my book is very well-loved by lots of people who have read it, so I hear.

So who has the gall, who has the chutzpah — that's one of my favorite words, if you haven't known me for a long time. The chutzpah. Who has the chutzpah to be like, "Hey, I bet my Facebook posts could be a whole freaking book"? That's me. I have the chutzpah to do that. It comes from deciding. And some people might say, "Oh wow, you have to have a really high opinion of yourself." And it's not that I have a high opinion of myself — even though I guess I actually do — but I have a high opinion of my ideas. I think they're interesting. I like the way I think. I enjoy the way my brain works.

You can also decide that you enjoy the way your brain works. Nobody told me that I was allowed to just decide that. I just decided it. My ideas, my stuff is worth packaging. And somebody who doesn't have this belief will find it even hard to put an idea they had into meme form, or just put up a quote that came from their own brain — even if it's not as fancy as putting it into a book form or a podcast form. What if you believed that your ideas, too, are worth packaging?

And I also believe that my ideas are worth following, so I'm always inviting people to join my email list, to listen to my podcast, to buy my book — because I genuinely believe my ideas are worth following.

I get to give it all away for free

And here's a final one that's really fun for me: I believe that my ideas are worth a lot of money. And I choose to give it all away for free. My Facebook group, my free e-books — there's a number of them — and this podcast. I do a lot of thinking, and it's just such a concentration of amazing ideas, ideas that are amazing to me, that I'm always sharing. And I think if you were to put a dollar value on it, it would be a lot.

And how I know that is that I genuinely care about people and serving them in a way that makes an actual tangible difference in their lives — that actually solves problems and helps them feel better about life and have more fun. All of those things have high value. If you were to appraise it in dollars, I think it would be a lot. And what's so fun is that I get to give it away for free. That makes me feel really generous. That makes me feel like, "Oh my God, I'm such a good person."

And it's fun, because imagine you had this amazing luxury item that costs a lot of money, it's very precious, and imagine you had, like, a thousand of it, and you were just able to give it to whoever wanted it on the street. Like, "Oh, here's an Hermès bag. Here, you just take it." You know? It's like you can just do this. Or if you're not into Hermès bags, or if you have no idea what I'm talking about, insert your own idea of a very high-value thing that you can imagine having a thousand of, and you can just give them away forever — and think about how people react to that, and how you would feel being the one doing that. That's how I feel about my content.

And of course, I charge people to work with me one-on-one. Not everything I do is free. But the vast majority of what I spend my time on in marketing is just creating amazing, high-value, interesting, useful ideas, writing them down or creating something with them, and giving them away for free, and reveling in watching it help people.

I never think of it as creating content

So that actually brings me to my final point. I never think of what I do as creating content — even though other people tell me I have a crazy amount of content, that I'm like the most prolific content creator ever. And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I guess you can put it that way." But I never think of it as creating content. I never give myself a task list of, "Okay, you gotta create three pieces of content today." I don't think that way.

Here's how I do think. I love thinking. I love having ideas. I love linking two unexpected ideas together. I love brainstorming about how people could be better served. I love thinking about the changes my clients and my friends could make in their lives. And I love thinking about how to present what I know in different ways. I love being inspired. I love inspiring people. And in this whole process of loving the things that I do, I also like to record them and package them up into a form that's fun and delicious to consume for others — because all of that gives me joy.

Let yourself be human

Now, I wanna say — not everything is rainbows and daisies and perfect, happy, pleasant... wait, not pleasant. Pleasantville all the time for me. Sometimes I feel stuck, sometimes I'm in a bad mood, and sometimes, on the very rare occasion, I get an unpleasant comment or something. It doesn't happen a lot, but sometimes it happens, and I'm having a bad day, and these beautiful, original ideas aren't naturally overflowing. Instead, I start to write something and it comes out angry. It comes out snotty and sarcastic and anxious — any of the things that I don't think are particularly useful to myself or to my people.

And those days happen too, and that's okay. It doesn't mean I've run out of useful thoughts, or loving, serving thoughts. It just means I'm having a bad day. And then I coach myself, and then life goes on. So I didn't want you to come away from this podcast with the idea that I'm always living in, like, orgasmic, blissful ideal land. That's not true. I have to feed my life. I have to be human and have my own share of meltdowns and anxieties and just feeling misanthropic sometimes. They definitely happen, but it's not all of me, and I just make myself come right back to what I love doing, and that all happens in its own good time.

So let yourself be human as you also enjoy turning yourself into a wonderful content machine. I don't even like that word, content. I'm gonna use it a lot, but — what does that even mean? I'm just writing. I'm creating pictures and images, and I'm speaking into the microphone like I'm doing now. I'm writing. These are all things humans have done for a long time. You can too.

It only takes minutes a day

Okay, I said that was the final note, but that actually wasn't the final note, because I forgot to tell y'all something important about this whole process. Very important point: because I produce so much, pretty much daily — I'll have multiple Facebook posts, each of which is long and super value-packed, and a podcast, super often — everyone's like, "How do you create so much content?" And what I really wanna tell you is that it actually only takes me minutes a day.

Writing a long-ish — long is relative — but a very meaty, substantive Facebook post takes me just a few minutes. Me recording a podcast? I don't plan it beforehand. Maybe I'll have two or three bullet points, maybe three or four. That's it. I just talk into the microphone. I'm doing that right now. No script. It takes me no time to prepare. So me recording it is all the time it takes, plus maybe five or 10 minutes of editing per episode. That's not very much time at all. And all the stuff I share to my group also just takes me three to four minutes per thing to write. My newsletters take a little more time — maybe 20, 30 minutes to write and another 10, 15 minutes to edit. I always edit, often more than once. And the editing takes place in spurts of, like, five to 10 minutes.

That's how I do it. So you'll see that even if I produce five pieces of content a day, it's not more than an hour total. I do it in pockets of time — a few minutes here, a few minutes there. And I really think people have this idea that content takes so much time, and I think it's because they don't trust themselves enough to just practice having an idea and sharing it. Having an idea and sharing it. Writing something up and editing it for one minute and posting it.

The reason I'm so good at — I think relatively good at — speaking into the microphone and having relatively little of it be fluff, having it be very substantive, is because I used to work in radio. I spent a lot of time polishing, getting right to the point, using my voice in an economical way where I'm getting the point across clearly. So all the training I've had in my life across different jobs helps me do what I do. But everything I know how to do, I've gotten to through practice.

If it takes you more than just a few minutes to write a substantive Facebook post — I promise you, once you start using that muscle in your brain, expressing yourself, getting to the point, making a powerful point, trusting the inspiration that comes to your mind, once you practice it, it's gonna take less and less and less time. It's not a magical ability I have to write things in a short time. I think it's a function of self-trust. Not only self-trust, but a trust that once you put your ideas out there, once you reveal who you are and give from who you are — in your imperfect but beautiful human state — trusting that it'll be appreciated by the right person. Trusting that once you release it out there like a bird, it flies into the air and makes all the ripples in the right places.

I just mixed metaphors right there. Like a bird making ripples? That doesn't make any sense. But — and then the bird ripples don't necessarily always come back in the form of high engagement, or people giving you a ton of money. And it's not about that, right? It's just the practice of showing up.

Closing

Now, I've told you everything I know today about how to become somebody who produces large volumes of high-quality content in a short time — how to make other people suspect that you secretly have an army of content producers behind you. It's these mindset shifts that are gonna get you there.

I hope this was useful today. And if you want to subscribe to my newsletters to see what kind of prolific content I'm talking about, or if you wanna be friends with me on Facebook, you can search my name on Facebook and friend me. You can go to my website and subscribe to my newsletter. You can follow me on Instagram. Hello — I'm all over social media, because I have this podcast on social media. So I hope to hang out with you on those other platforms. I'll talk to you later, and I hope you have a beautiful, fantabulous day. Bye.