Finding content ideas doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, some of the best content ideas are hiding in the most ordinary moments of your week. Like the story about the time I lost a perfectly good head of broccoli.
The time was last week. And technically, I lost it. I have no idea where it is. I’m presuming I threw it out. (And hoping like hell I don’t find a mouldy green blob in a few weeks.)
It was Tuesday night. We were precisely 7 nights into our new house. Because of the move, we’d missed a week of swimming lessons, so we had a double class that Tuesday night. Which, IYKYK, means double the amount of pool water swallowed.
Kere made dinner. The kids all woofed it down (another perk of the double swimming lesson). I started cleaning up and realised he didn’t cook the broccoli I had bought.
I know I bought it and brought it home. I remember getting annoyed that it was crumbling all through my new reusable bag. Anyway, as we’re mid-argument about the mysterious broccoli, I got “the look” from my son.
I managed to scoop him up just in time to watch a ginormous vom splash around our brand new kitchen sink.
And that was the end of the broccoli conversation.
Until last night, when I remembered I never actually resolved where the hell it ended up. (I’m praying I don’t have a follow-up email in six months.)
On the outside, Kere and I have been as cool as cucumbers about this whole move. But on the inside? Maybe, just maybe, we’re scrambling.
So what does any of this have to do with your marketing?
This is exactly how most people feel about their content.
Everything looks fine on the outside. Showing up, posting, ticking the boxes. But on the inside? It’s scramble-town.
The biggest scramble-enablers I see:
- Not knowing what to write
- Feeling like you’re saying the same thing over and over
- Worrying your content is too boring
- Relying on AI to do the heavy lifting without giving it any real substance to work with
Not about to start preaching, by the way. I’ve been guilty of every single one of these.
The broccoli story isn’t interesting because it’s dramatic. (Well, it kinda was at the time, but you get my point.) It’s interesting because it’s real, and specific, and you can picture it. You can smell the pool water. You can feel the panic of “the look.” You know exactly what it’s like to be mid-argument about something completely mundane when life absolutely derails you.
That’s all good content ever needs to be.
The real problem isn’t that you have nothing to say
It’s that you’re waiting for something interesting enough to happen before you think it’s worth writing about.
You’re discarding the broccoli stories. The small, specific, Tuesday-night moments that make people stop scrolling because they feel like they’re reading about their own life.
Those moments are your content. You’re just not collecting them, and finding the angle that your audience cares about.
Three questions to ask yourself when you’re stuck
1. What have your clients been asking you lately? Or what trends are you noticing? If one person is asking, ten more are wondering. That’s a post right there (and probably a blog, an email, and a reel…)
2. What can’t you shut up about? That topic you bring up in every meeting, every coffee catch-up, every discovery call? That’s a core messaging theme. Lean into it.
3. What’s something that happened this week that you’ve already told someone else about? If you’ve repeated a story, it’s worth writing down. The fact that you’ve already told it means it landed. That’s your raw material.
How to stop losing the good stuff
The problem with real-life content is that it disappears fast. You have a moment, a conversation, a vom in the sink, a client call that made you stop and think, and if you don’t write it down immediately, it’s gone.
That’s exactly why I use a Dribble Diary: a running note where I jot down the little things as they happen. Even just a few words is enough. The broccoli is still gone, but at least I got a blog post out of it.
The more you practise noticing the small things, the easier it becomes to see the connection between your real life and the work you do. And when you find that connection (even a loose, slightly absurd one) that’s when your content starts to feel like you.
The broccoli story isn’t special. That’s the point.
It’s a missing vegetable and a sick kid on a Tuesday night. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And yet here we are.
Your audience doesn’t need your content to be polished or profound. They need it to be real. Specific. Human.
Start with whatever happened this week. Even if it seems boring. Even if you can’t immediately see the connection to your business. Write it down anyway.
The marketing angle will come. It almost always does.
