Generic Content Trap

He said, “think for me.”

Two years into running an agency, already helped scale eight businesses and this gentleman asked me to look at his content. The problem was that I’d read versions of it before from other people running similar businesses. The same handful of lines about hard work and trusting the process which was recycled. Delete his name from any of those posts and it could belong to anyone else in his industry. I asked him that if nobody knows you, why would they trust you?

We stopped polishing the quotes and started using what he actually had. Two years of decisions nobody had seen. Eight accounts, eight outcomes, real people he’d worked with. I told him to write about why he’d started the agency, what he’d gotten wrong early on, what it actually sounded like inside a hard client conversation and to go further than his own story, ask his past clients to describe, in their own words, what had changed because of the work. Record it. Preserve it. Somewhere in that conversation he said something I still think about, “I want you to think for me.”

I heard it as a compliment at the time until then I’d thought of what I did as content work with a bit of strategy mixed in. That sentence flipped the ratio as he was asking me to think on his behalf. If that’s what someone with real results wanted from me, the thinking was never the side skill. It was the whole job. Looking back, it was also a diagnosis. That’s the part about positioning most people get backwards. Generic content is generic because it could have been said by anyone. That’s the actual difference between creating content and understanding how someone thinks. Content polishes a decision that’s already been made. Thinking is what makes the decision in the first place. Most people skip straight to the polishing because polishing feels like progress and deciding feels like delay.

I chose the second one. What’s the last thing you published that no one else in your industry could have written?