Source content topics

Topics are the first of the three levers in a hook — a headline cannot rescue a subject nobody cares about, and a format cannot either.

1. The five lenses

1. The far past — life lessons. The biggest category of the five. These are the things that changed how you behave: what you used to believe, what happened, what you believe now. The shape runs: I thought this was how it worked. Then I saw evidence that it was not. So I changed what I did, and here is what followed. A simple story, and one lesson is enough for a whole piece.

2. The recent past — your own calendar. Open your calendar and look at yesterday, or at last week. Go through what you actually did and who you actually spoke to, one entry at a time. There will be conversations in there that other people would find genuinely interesting.

The reason this lens feels empty is not that your week was dull. It is that nobody looks back. Everybody lives a life containing interesting things and almost nobody takes the time to review it.

3. The present — capture it as it happens. Note things down in the moment. The low-tech version is emailing yourself: somebody on your team is excellent at their job, that is worth saying, and the note may become a piece later about what it is like to work with people who are good at their work.

The better version is to post the note somewhere that tolerates high frequency, so that the idea gets tested as it occurs rather than months afterwards. That does two jobs at once: you find out in real time which ideas land, and the feed itself becomes a second calendar you can scroll through when you sit down to record something longer. That one was interesting. People liked that. Do more of it.

4. Trends — but only on your own ground. Comment on what is happening, on the condition that it touches something you genuinely have expertise on.

The condition is the whole lens. Commenting on some scandal you know nothing about adds nothing and reflects badly on you. Commenting on a new tax rule that affects businesses of the size you work with is valuable, because the audience has already heard the news reported and what they have not heard is how somebody actually doing this work is responding to it — and that person probably has something useful to say. They will listen to that specifically: not the coverage, but the practitioner's answer to the coverage.

5. Manufactured — go and do something interesting. Work backwards: ask what a lot of people would find interesting, then do that thing and document it. Living on a tiny budget for a year; eating the world's hottest chip. The topic is created rather than found.

2. Which of the five to use

The first four are the ones in habitual use. The fifth is included for completeness and is used by plenty of people successfully; it is simply not the preferred approach here. That is a stated preference and not a rule — nothing about the fifth lens is broken, and the other four are available to anybody without a production budget.

Lens	The question it asks	Where the raw material already is
Far past	What did I used to believe that turned out to be wrong?	Memory
Recent past	What did I do and who did I speak to this week?	Your calendar
Present	What just struck me as worth noting?	A note to yourself, or a high-frequency feed
Trends	What is happening that I have real standing to comment on?	The news, filtered by your expertise
Manufactured	What would people find interesting enough that I should go and do it?	Nowhere yet — you create it

3. The default method

When you do not want to choose a lens, use the preferred method here: do things, talk about what you did, and repeat.

That is the whole procedure, and it has a useful failure mode. If you run it and find you have nothing to talk about, the diagnosis is not that you are bad at content. It is that you are not doing enough things — and maybe that, in itself, is the lesson worth making the piece about.

4. When you cannot tell what they will find interesting

Talk about all of it, and let the audience tell you. Put out the whole range, watch what they respond to, and then do more of that.

5. What this page does not cover

Writing the line that presents the topic is on SOP 21, matching the platform's format is on SOP 20, and the structures that hold attention once the topic has done its job are on SOP 23.

Content pillars, editorial calendars, posting cadence and repurposing one topic across platforms are not covered on this page.