These days, whatever field you’re in, you want to be a content creator. And for good reason, it gives you an audience, people who listen, people who buy from you, people who hire you.
The problem is most people don’t know what to post.
So they post randomly. Lifestyle content, cars, food, wherever they’ve been. Then after a while they disappear, because they’ve run out of things to say. That won’t make you a content creator, unless you’re actually in the car business or the food business.
Most people sharing lifestyle content end up feeling depressed, pressured, short of time, stuck. Why? Because they’re going in the wrong direction.
It’s like wanting good grades in maths and spending all your time reading English literature. You can work hard and still get nowhere.
After reading books, articles, and magazines about content creation, the best thing I found was Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.
Let me explain what it taught me.
First, understand what being a content creator is actually worth. In one line: opportunities land on your doorstep.
Everyone wants that. The only real question is what to post.
The answer is simple. Share your work, not your life.
Work is one part of your life. You also eat, spend time with family, go on holiday, take long drives. None of that needs to be shared. What you share is the work.
How you got a client. How you completed a job. How you find clients in the first place. What a particular client was like to work with. What you’re learning right now. Everything from your work is material.
And here’s what happens. You never run out of ideas. And you never feel exposed, because you aren’t sharing anything personal.
Lifestyle is the output of what you do professionally. Output can be faked, and nobody is genuinely interested in it as content.
Nobody watches a film about buyers picking products off a shelf. But people spend hours watching how those products were made.
Nobody wants to know how many cars you own after building a brand. Everyone wants to know how you built it.
So share the process. It keeps you public and private at the same time. It makes you visible as a professional in your field. It finds you clients, and it finds customers for what you sell.