Leadership is Creating Content
Analyzing what it means to create content and making the connection to what leaders do.
The whole process of creating content is straight pain or ecstasy or both. It depends on practice and skill and honing strengths and delegating weaknesses. Oh, does that sound like leadership? Practice and honing — strength and weaknesses.
Quick breakdown of creating content:
- Inspiration: the tapping into or manufacturing of a message.
- Ideation: everything from refining of what, clarifying why, detecting for whom of a message.
- Ejaculation: the release of an inspiration or the transfer of a message.
- Distribution: the effective or not use of networks to disseminate a message.
You could replace message information but I guess it doesn’t read quite as powerfully.
Content is Messaging Inspiration. Okay, let me use fancy words. Content is the communication and articulation of an inspiration in the form of a message.
So what does a leader do exactly ?
- Inspiration: tapping into and manufacturing of a message.
- Ideation: effective collaboration to refine, hone and clarify a message.
- Ejaculation: release or communication of refined messages.
- Distribution: ensuring the right audience get the right context to the right message.
Leadership is the journey to find clarity, own the roadmap that delivering clarity will provide and influencing your community and network to act in alignment with what is clear.
So I ask you, have you ever seen good content that doesn’t bring clarity fo something?
Have you ever met a leader that doesn’t provide clarity ?
Have you ever met a leader that doesn’t answer questions or a leader that doesn’t offer answers or a leader that doesn’t set his/her team out to get answers or act from a place of clarity ?
Have you found yourself gravitating to people that help you sift through the mental fog in your head? When we say her content is relevant, what does it mean? Does it have something to do with providing clarity ? Does their clarity make them a thought leader? If they are thought leaders and authority figures does that mean clarity they provide made them so?
Does the community gather around a leader that provides answers to only questions asked? Is there a more significant value to people who provide answers to questions not yet asked but that needs to be asked ?
Take a moment and look around you, the leaders at work, the people getting promoted, the people getting married, the people leading churches, the people getting elected, the people listened to. They all have the same thing is common.
Clarity.
In a world where AI is coming. Automation is here. Technology is no longer in the past. Your content is gonna be your identity.
Here is the sad part. We are already creating content for as long as we make decisions, go to places, communicate, share ideas, we are already affecting clarity around us.
The only question is whether or not we will become leaders. We don’t have a choice to create content or not but we have an opportunity to provide clarity and thus become leaders.
The word personal brand can often sound daunting. It can sound like a lot of work. I am convinced that it doesn’t need to be. But even more convinced that in the future, it will describe us more effectively than any resume. Because jobs will focus on putting people in positions to identify the kinda content they naturally create and helping them refine, release and redistribute it.
It’s just so funny to me that I never made the connection till now.
Leaders get paid to
- Build a team
- Create a vision
- Communicate changes
- Create space for others to thrive
- Lead meetings and discussions
Underneath it, leaders get paid to create amazing content.
So I ask you, do you wanna be the next CEO of Amazon?
Create content that provides clarity for problems that will impact majority tomorrow.