How should you edit your thought leadership? How can you shape and simplify your ideas? Consider your perspective the YOU edit — your unique way of carving a big idea into your singular perspective.
As a ghostwriter, I think of every project like a jigsaw puzzle. I have a box full of pieces — some of them are upside-down, some don’t look like they belong, some are obviously corners or edges. My job is to make sense of all of those hundreds of pieces and put them together to make a puzzle. (The pieces here are someone’s ideas, stories, experiences, frameworks, asides, etc.)
What’s unique about ghostwriting (and nothing like jigsaw puzzling) is that my final, completed puzzle may look very different than how another ghostwriter would assemble the same pieces. Plus, this puzzle is subjective, with no picture on the box to guide me.
It’s MY edit. It’s how I decided that the pieces most obviously fit together — and even the pieces I left out of the final puzzle tell a story. Because another writer would almost certainly put the pieces in a slightly different order. They would probably zoom in more on one specific idea. They might include a whole section that I left out.
Which of your ideas will make it into the YOU edit?
So, to continue the metaphor, let’s think about all of your collected ideas, lessons learned, and experiences — your body of work — as a big box of jumbled puzzle pieces.
There are a million ways you could package those ideas into “thought leadership.” You could go deep on just one topic area. You could look for patterns across all of your work. You could weave together lessons you’ve learned in different seasons. But how you package those ideas, how you make your edit, what you decide to cut and what you emphasize, is part of what makes your perspective unique.
People don’t just want the jumbled box of all your ideas. They want the YOU edit. They need your help identifying what’s important, what’s worth paying attention to, and what patterns are significant.
How will YOU edit your story? What does the YOU edit look like, and how is it different than your colleagues’ or competitors’ edit?
