It happens every year. A project leaves me completely, totally, helplessly stuck.
This time around, the word I’d use was worse than stuck: I was stymied.
This is not a good feeling, since my job is to help people get unstuck. If I’m slogging through thick mud myself, I can’t exactly pull someone else out of it.
But a simple question helped me reframe the project and unstick myself.
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The project was simple: Work with a startup to write clear copy about who they are, what they do, and why people should want to work with them.
Working with startups can sometimes make me feel like a kid in a candy store — it’s a blank slate! So much possibility! No existing corporate jargon to excavate.
But on the flip slide, working with startups can be incredibly difficult — it’s a blank slate! All possibility and no firm precedent! N-o-o-o existing corporate copy to pull from or build on!
In this case, I was feeling the blues of that flip side. To make the challenge worse, the client wanted a “very formal,” “buttoned-up” tone (which will make any writer start to feel a little itchy) and their industry, I quickly learned, is built on mysterious acronymns, numbers, and complicated language. “Do I have to use the word ‘asset’? I’d ask. YES, they’d respond.
😶
I tried looking for inspiration across the internet. I surveyed their closest competitors. All boring. Lots of words that seemed to mean nothing. Everyone was dancing around what they really did.
When my brain and screen felt crowded, I’d make a new, blank Google Doc. But the new Docs would got messy, too.
I tried asking some AI writing bots for their take. But I pretty much immediately remembered that when you feed AI bad inputs (“make this incomprehensible jargon somehow…better?”), the outputs are (duh) terrible.
I was completely stuck.
As my deadline ticked closer, I was procrastinating clearing my head by taking a walk and listening to a podcast. I listened to an episode of The Lazy Genius, a show that has nothing to do with writing, and definitely nothing to do with this client’s industry. My friends, it was an episode about cleaning your house. I know. I was really desperate for any distraction.
But! This show about cleaning was really about how to prioritize what matters to you. I listened to the host, Kendra, keep circling back to that phrase: what matters most to you. She emphasized that what matters most to her probably isn’t what matters most to someone else. The key is answering that question for yourself so that your actions can align with your values.
Aha!
I realized with a jolt that I was having such a hard time with this particular startup project because I didn’t know what mattered most. I was trying to write in a few words what this company was all about, but I hadn’t figured that out for myself yet.
I went back to my stacks of notes. And I found it, buried in one of my early call transcripts: the one most important quality that makes this company stand out. The value that they’re chasing.
I talked to the founder to get more color around that one, core, most important idea, and he delivered all of the meaning I’d been grasping to find.
And then I was off to the races. I just had to ask what mattered most so that I could block out everything else. Because just like ChatGPT, human writers only produce good work when they have inputs that make sense. We need insight and inspiration to tell a story that lands.
If you’re feeling stuck, ask: What matters most here?
