The Post Is The Work

The great physicist Richard Feynman used to keep a box of notebooks.

Historian Charles Weiner said that the notes and sketches were a useful record of Feynman’s day to day work.

Feynman took issue with that statement and said, ‘I actually did the work on that paper there.’

Weiner tried again and said, ‘The work was done in your head, and the record of it is still here.’

Feynman again pushed back and said, ‘No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.’

That sounds like him being really pedantic.

He’s saying the physics didn’t happen in his head and then get written down afterwards. It was something he wrote on the page.

But he was right.

The paper wasn’t this report of the thinking that he was doing, but the equipment that allowed him to do the thinking.

I think about content in very much the same way.

You have an idea that you think about in a shower or on a walk, or you steal an idea from someone else’s page, and then you make content about it.

You choose a format, a hook, you write it, you schedule it.

The thinking is finished before you’ve opened the app which makes the post a record of your thinking

If the post is a record, then obviously people optimise it.

They create templates, they steal a hook from a ‘best hooks for Instagram’ list.

They’re just formatting something that already existed.

But I think the post is the work.

Loads of coaches tell me they’ve got nothing to say, and I don’t think that’s true.

I think most coaches have got lots to say and nothing left to say it with.

I think most have spent ten years designing the thinking out of their coaching business through templates, scripts, swipe files, a content calendar, content pillars, content strategy, and none of those places have a coach sit down and try and work out what they think about something.

If you have an idea drought and a thinking drought at the same time, they’re not two problems, you have the same drought.

Now I use AI as part of my process, and it could be argued that I’m doing the same thing.

But if the writing is the thinking, then handing over a first draft isn’t outsourcing the writing.

It’s outsourcing the bit where you find out what you actually think about a topic.

I use AI to help me after I know what I think - Occasionally I’ll use it to make sure I do know what I think, and to sharpen what that thinking is.

But it never gets to be the thing that does the thinking itself.

Most coaches would get more clients if they did more of their own thinking, and used content to help them understand what they think - instead of as a vehicle to follow boring trends.