4 Key Habits That Helped Me Consistently Create Content While Shipping Products

Knowing how to build something means nothing if nobody knows it exists.

I loved building.

I loved the feeling of getting an idea, knowing exactly how to bring it to life, and jumping on it to get it shipped.

I had all the technical skill I needed to get it completed.

I even had a job that constantly exercised my coding skills.

But I knew that my 9-5 wasn’t exercising my true potential.

I was capable of so much more.

I built and launched multiple side projects, only to see them left almost completely untouched.

I realised something was missing.

I could be building incredibly valuable products that solve massive problems for people – but without a way to get it front of people, I’d never be able to see success.

All day I’d scroll Twitter and YouTube, watching people who’d managed to figure it out and do it themselves.

They’d found a way to build side projects in their spare time. They’d found a way to get their ideas and content across to the rest of the world.

What were they doing that I was missing?

I finally realised.

What made them different wasn’t some talent I couldn’t compete with – it was understanding that attention matters just as much as execution.

I needed to build an audience.

Building An Audience

An audience? As in like becoming a social media influencer?

I instantly counted myself out of even thinking about what that would look like.

Even the thought of figuring out how to create content to post was daunting to me.

I did not consider myself to be a “content creator” kind of guy in the slightest.

I was a programmer. I didn’t know the first thing about creating content. My ability to write posts or record myself speaking was awful.

Why would anybody want to follow me?

Even if I did start posting on social media, the thought of having to upload and consistently post seemed like an impossible task.

But again, day after day, I’d see these people that I’d follow on socials finding success, posting regularly, building things, and growing their audience.

They didn’t seem like superhumans. They just seemed like ordinary people who somehow figured out a technique to share their journeys, and add value to people through what they were posting.

How did these individuals do it?

There must be some kind of technique or secret that they are using to create valuable content over such a long time period, all while building side projects and excellent products at the same time

There was no way they were doing all of this without some kind of method to keep it up over such a long time.

All while finding time to also build projects themselves too.

I decided that I needed to figure out what it was.

I started looking at every successful influencer I knew who was maintaining this lifestyle of shipping products while creating content.

I studied their routines, the type of content they created, which platforms they were posting on, and how frequently they were posting.

I looked at everything. I listened to the advice they had given other people on this exact topic. I listened to podcasts about their backgrounds and come-up stories.

Finally, I started to see similarities in the approaches they were using.

There were a few recurring techniques that every one of these successful builders/influencers was implementing.

The remainder of this letter is going to be broken into covering two key parts:

• A single foundational skill I found that every individual had which attributed to their success
• The exact set of techniques I saw as a common theme in every successful person I studied.

The Foundation Of All Content

As I studied every builder/content creator who was seeing success, I made the observation that there was a single foundational skill behind each one’s content creation.

Every person had a different method of delivering their content. Different mediums they created content through, different styles of content, different topics and ways of structuring their delivery.

Yet I realised that when you boiled all of these different mediums down, they all had one thing in common.

At the foundation of all content styles and all forms of content delivery, was this single skill:

The ability to write.

I had never seen this before, but when I thought about it, it made perfect sense.

Think about it.

• Tweets/Threads - Catchy, short form writing
• YouTube videos - A written script / overarching video structure to follow
• Reels - The leading hooks, the overall structures or voiceovers
• Newsletters - Long form writing
• Podcasts - Written structure of topics to cover, questions to ask
• Music - Lyrics, important themes throughout songs

Think of any form of media you like. Underneath it lays the foundation of an ability to write well, and articulate your thoughts to an audience.

The one who is putting out consistent, high-value content is one who knows how to write.

How Can I Get Better At Writing?

When I started out, I genuinely considered myself to be completely incapable of becoming a good writer.

I hated English in high school, hated writing essays, and dropped it as a subject the minute I was able to.

I considered myself about as far away from “a writer” as one could be.

But I understood how valuable it was as a foundational skill.

The more I looked around, the more I realised how many successful people possessed the ability to articulate their thoughts.

If I wanted to build an audience for myself, I was going to have to set aside my unwillingness and pick up a pen.

I spent time researching how somebody could even improve their writing ability.

The more I researched, the more I realised:

• No one is born a great writer, it’s the result of practicing to get better.
• Writing is like any muscle in that the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes.
• With the right setup, you can improve your writing ability in a very short period of time.

For a complete breakdown of a practical roadmap you can follow to become proficient at writing, I would highly recommend a previous letter I wrote about here which explains it in greater detail:

The One Non-Technical Skill Made Me a Better Software Engineer Than 95% of My Peers

But in a nutshell, here are some key practices you can start to improve your writing ability:

Start journaling ideas - Get into the habit of writing down any interesting thought or idea that comes to you. Being able to articulate ideas in words on paper is incredibly beneficial for exercising your writing muscle.

Leverage the Internet for learning - We live in 2025, not 1925. You have access to the greatest accumulation of knowledge ever known to mankind – for free. Invest time into finding the best teachers and courses on writing. Pay money if you have to. There are resources out there that outline the exact roadmap you can take to improve your writing skills. Use this superpower to your advantage.

Use AI as a sidekick - AI will not write for you. AI will never replace authentic writing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly valuable to use while writing. Use AI to supplement your writing. It is a superpower at brainstorming ideas, linking ideas together, rewording sentences, and helping you find topics to expand on further. If you use it right, it can save you hundreds of hours.

Writing to solve problems - If you struggle to write, rewire your thinking to purely do it for the purpose of solving a problem. This mentality changed the game for me. Suddenly, instead of staring at a blank page straining my mind to think of ideas, switching to solving a problem made it infinitely easier. Identify what knowledge you have floating around in your brain that solves a problem for somebody. Get it down on paper. Any problem you’ve encountered will have others out there currently struggling through the same thing. Your knowledge would be invaluable to them.

Road Bumps Beyond Writing:

I knew I wanted to build an audience.

I knew that writing was the single most beneficial skill I could learn in helping me get there.

I invested time and effort into upskilling my writing ability.

By no means was I a saint at writing, but after getting the practice in I did see massive improvements in my ability to capture thoughts through words.

Yet even when I’d finally got to this point, even when I finally considered myself semi-proficient at writing, I realised that this skill alone wasn’t going to be enough to help me create a social media presence.

I could have sworn I was doing everything correctly.

I was shipping products.

I was writing and creating as much content as I could.

But this is where I hit some critical hurdles that I didn’t even see coming.

Being able to solve the problems I ran into below is what I believe separates the successful from the ones who won’t make it.

Let me explain each of the problems I ran into, and then I’m going to break down what I found successful influencers doing to mitigate these issues.

The longer I tried to maintain a balance of creating content while building products, the more these problems arose:

• The struggle of consistency - Creating enough content to post for a week I could do. Keeping up consistency over the span of months seemed like an impossible task. There were constant fluctuations where my motivation would decrease and I’d struggle to still continue producing.
• Running out of ideas - There were points where I felt like I’d written about every idea I’d ever thought of. I had the terrible feeling that I’d written about everything I knew about, and had no other value left to give. I had no predefined system for capturing ideas or system for coming up with new ones.
• The amount of time it took to write - The biggest problem I faced was simply the sheer amount of time I had to dedicate toward sitting down and grinding out hours of content creation. I forced myself through it, assuming it was just my weak writing or creativity skills. It eventually got to the point where I realised that the amount of time I invested on a weekly basis was simply not sustainable. Something had to change.

Techniques Of Winners

It took me a tonne of trial and error to come to the conclusion that the problems above were my biggest bottlenecks.

They were invisible killers that only appeared after time in the game.

I knew that if I faced them, others who had successfully created content for longer periods than me must have faced them too then, and they must have come up with solutions to solve them.

I took the time to search for solutions they’d come up with.

Here are the recurring habits I found in those creators who’d managed to consistently create valuable content over prolonged periods of time:

1) Create a Content Repurposing System

As I tried to create content over the period of weeks and months, I realised it wasn’t sustainable to bump out a certain number of Twitter threads each week, as well as a long-form post, alongside reels and YouTube videos.

Creating that much unique content on a weekly basis was eating up way too much of my time, it was sucking me dry of ideas, and it was a recipe for burnout if I kept it up.

That’s when I heard numerous creators speaking about the concept of content repurposing.

The idea where instead of constantly trying to come up with brand new ideas for every piece of content you make, you take existing ideas you’ve touched on in the past or the ideas of others who inspire you, and you add unique insights or additional perspectives to these existing ideas.

By doing this, you’re essentially creating a massive interlinked system of all the ideas that you portray as “you” to your audience, and you’re reiterating the same underlying tone while adding unique value and insight by linking in new ideas with each post.

It’s an incredibly valuable way to deliver value to your audience, but in a sustainable way.

For example, an intelligent creator would decide on a single key idea that they intended to articulate and expand upon over the period of an entire week.

They’d write long-form pieces of content on this main overarching idea.

Then, instead of needing to think of brand new ideas for every other form of content they wanted to produce - they’d simply take the core ideas from their long-form content, and break those down into other mediums.

One long-form piece of writing could become 20 individual tweets.

You could extract 4 ideas for reels out of the main topics covered in your original idea.

Two ideas from your main content could be expanded on in the form of Twitter threads.

A blog article could be repurposed into a YouTube video.

You get the idea, right?

Repurposing one key underlying idea in numerous forms and mediums.

When I realised how valuable an approach like this was, it changed my life.

Instead of straining for hours thinking of brand new ideas for everything, taking a core idea I intended to really reiterate over a week and extrapolating all the underlying ideas out of that was so much more sustainable over time.

2) Find & Protect Your Einstein Window

What is an Einstein window?

It’s a period of time in every human’s day when their mental clarity is at its peak, and they have the most productivity to bump out tasks.

Everybody has one.

Everybodies is different.

Some people swear by 4am wake ups, and find themselves most productive in the morning hours.

Some of the best artists of all time only woke up in the late hours of the morning, and found themselves producing their best work in the late hours of the night.

Your job is to study yourself, and to find the times of day that you know you’re going to be able to produce your best work.

Once you know these times, you must do everything in your power to protect them.

Create a distraction-free environment where you can purely focus on a single task.

Create strict boundaries on who can contact you during these times.

Identify all the things that hinder your focus, and do anything you can to eliminate them.

Every great creator knows when they’re able to produce their best work.

Every great creator has a time of day when they’re in the lab, working on their craft without distraction.

3) The Mind Blank Bank

Anyone who’s tried to consistently produce valuable content for longer than a month eventually hits a day where they find themselves drawing a blank.

I noticed numerous influencers speaking about the concept of an “idea capture system”.

Essentially creating a go-to location to get your mind flowing with ideas the second you find yourself looking at a blank page not knowing what to write.

When a creator finds themselves struggling for ideas in the present, they must either:

1) Rely on past moments in time when they did have ideas

2) Expose themselves to information sources in the hopes ideas come to them in the future

Either of these options work, but the former allows you to have an idea bank without needing to spend time in order to fetch new ideas.

That’s why it’s so important to capture ideas as you think of them.

By starting a system of capturing ideas now, you’re setting your future self up for success.

So what does this look like practically?

There are two parts to it.

The first is a tangible list of places you can look for ideas.

The second is a way of provoking your mind in a way such that it can take the ideas from your source, and convert them into something worth writing about.

Defining Your Idea Sources

An idea bank needs a source of where you’re getting the ideas from.

Whether they realise it or not, every human on this planet is collecting ideas.

It’s just a matter of whether they’re intentional about capturing them or not.

Every video you watch, podcast you listen to, Instagram story you view.

These all contain ideas, and they all spark unique thought processes in every one of us.

It’s our responsibility to capture them.

Become highly intentional about gathering and storing these ideas that come to you as you consume media of any given form.

This is the single biggest piece of advice I could give to anybody trying to create content on any medium.

Store all your ideas, and create a tangible list of places you can look when you hit a mind blank.

Here are some examples from my idea bank:

• Screenshots from my camera roll on my phone.
• Old Twitter bookmarks
• Highlights from notes on Kindle
• Notes from podcasts/YouTube videos I’ve listened to
• Ideas from old journal entries (again touching on the importance of maintaining a journal and adding any interesting ideas/thoughts to it that you have as you find them)
• Email newsletters from influencers I look up to

Create your own. Find the places you can go to when you need ideas.

Extracting Value From Ideas

You can have an infinite supply of ideas, but without a way of extracting value from them, they’re useless.

I mentioned earlier that we no longer live in 1925, but 2025.

In 1925, for somebody to extract value out of a series of ideas, they would have genuinely needed to sit down with a blank piece of paper and pencil and draw them out one by one.

Right now, we’re living in a time where the tools to accelerate this process are more powerful than ever.

AI is such a new concept to humans. It will take a bit of getting used to when it comes to rewiring our brains for what we are capable of now that we have it at our fingertips.

We can use AI as a separate consciousness, that when partnered with the ideas going on in our own mind, becomes incredibly valuable for outputting genuinely valuable content.

The possibilities with this are endless.

Ultimately you need to realise that AI is a valuable supplement to your content creation, and it’s up to you to tinker with how you partner with it in achieving that.

Below are two examples of prompts you could use when it comes to thinking up ideas when you’re facing writer’s block in the content creation process:

Prompt 1:

I’m going to give you an idea I’ve found interesting and insightful. I want to write or create content about this idea.

Please take the idea and brainstorm how I, as the writer, could angle or frame this idea in a way that solves a problem or provides a clear value to a particular audience or type of person.

Then, generate 5 potential content angles or solution-based takes on this idea. For each one, briefly describe:

- The unique angle or insight.

- The specific problem it solves or value it offers.

- The type of person (audience) this angle would resonate with most.

Idea:

{}

Prompt 2:

I'm going to walk you through a content ideation method based on the "Audience & Outcome" framework.

Here’s how it works: I’ll tell you who the content is meant for (the audience), and what they’re hoping to achieve (their goal or desired transformation).

Your task is to generate 10 content ideas that speak directly to this group, helping them move closer to that goal or outcome.

Target Audience:

{}

Desired Outcome:

{}

Remember, it’s important that you always treat AI as a supplement, or a sidekick that can help you, rather than putting your full reliance upon it.

If you think AI is fully capable of replacing the human touch, you’re mistaken.

4) Ruthless Self Reflection & Iteration

No one who finds success would have had every routine, technique and system that they have in place now when they first started.

Yet those exact routines and systems are the very thing that makes them successful.

If they started at zero too, how did they come across those working systems?

Through relentless self-reflection, looking at exactly what they were doing wrong, and putting systems in place that prevented them from happening again.

Their success is merely the result of identifying exactly what they were weak in, and doing anything in their power to get better at it.

Start your week by defining what is of the highest importance for you to get done.

Record exactly how you end up spending your time throughout the week.

You will likely find yourself getting distracted and sidetracked by all sorts of unnecessary tasks. Even ones that seem productive in the moment, but are still taking you away from working on those most important tasks you defined in the beginning.

At the end of the week, retrospectively look at what you wanted to work on, what you ended up working on, and what the biggest bottlenecks were that stopped you from achieving that.

This is not an easy process.

It is a humbling experience having to stare yourself in the face and realise that even though you genuinely had the will to be productive, you still got distracted and sidetracked.

It’s very easy to create coping mechanisms or excuses for why it didn’t get done.

This is what most humans fall into.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter why you couldn’t work on what you said you would.

What matters is that you iterate, and create systems and environments that stop it from happening again the next week.

This is what separates the winners from the losers.

Believe it or not, almost any weakness or bottleneck you’re facing that hinders your progress would have also been faced by others.

If it was faced by others, there are likely solutions to them already that you can adopt for yourself.

Don’t strain yourself on reinventing the wheel and coming up with a solution.

• Identify the bottlenecks stopping you from getting to where you want
• Have the courage to admit that you’re failing in that area
• Search for solutions that others have made to those bottlenecks
• Follow through with the self-discipline necessary to implement those solutions in your own life

An individual who truly looks themselves in the soul week in and week out, identifying where they’re falling short and iterating on it, is an unstoppable force.

-

To a lot of us, building an online presence seems completely out of reach.

It’s so easy to get disgruntled and put yourself out of contention to even try.

But look around. There are many other everyday people who are finding success for themselves.

They’re able to build an audience sustainably over time, all while shipping products and building things.

Success isn’t based on somebody’s luck or natural talent.

It’s based on core foundational skills, and the valuable habits they’ve implemented along their journey which got them to where they are now.

Being able to clearly articulate your thoughts in words is the single most valuable skill across every content platform.

As long as you have that foundational skill, it just becomes a matter of implementing the following systems:

• Create a system for repurposing your content - Make a sustainable routine that allows you to consistently reiterate and remix existing key ideas and points that you are portraying to your audience.
• Find and protect your most productive hours - Find your Einstein window. Do everything you can to maximise the productivity you have within that time. Remove all distractions. Make it as friction-free as possible to do good work.
• Create a mind-blank bank - Every creator will face times when they lack ideas. A successful one will see this coming and have a predefined system in place on exactly how to start getting ideas flowing again. Capture ideas as you think of them. Use modern tools to prompt your brain on how to extract value from them.
• Perpetually iterate on weaknesses - Set goals every week. Record what you spend time actually doing. Review how it turned out at the end of the week. Be relentless in spotting your own weaknesses and excuses. Create systems that prevent you from falling for the same distractions next time.

These are the systems and techniques that come as a result of years of successful influencers’ hard work and iteration.

Instead of struggling through trial and error on your own to find out the hard way, take on this advice and implement it early.

By implementing these and remaining consistent in producing high-quality outputs, it’s simply a matter of time before you reap the benefits.

Good luck out there.

- Cole

If you’re interested in escaping from a traditional 9-5, leveraging AI to build a future of your own, and capitalising on the digital renaissance, subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

You can also follow me on twitter @cole_mccon