Stop Optimizing Your Content Strategy

For the past few months, I’ve found myself circling back to an idea I hadn’t thought about in a while: life design. It’s a concept popularized by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans out of Stanford. At its core, it’s simple. Instead of drifting into a life, you design it. You experiment. You pay attention. You adjust. You treat your life less like a plan to execute and more like something to shape.

That sounds clean in theory. In practice, it collides with a very different voice.

If you’re self-employed, or even adjacent to that world, you probably know the voice I’m talking about. It’s the one that shows up uninvited and asks:

How’s your content strategy going?

That voice is rarely casual or curious. Usually, it is urgent. As if everything depends on it.

As if your future is sitting on a fragile stack of posts, waiting for the algorithm to decide your fate. As if there is some perfectly tuned strategy out there and, if you could just find it, everything would click. Audience > Credibility > Clients >Momentum.

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to answer that question. And then, I remembered that life design offered me a different question. A better one.

Not: Is my content strategy working?

But: Do I have something worth saying?

That question lands differently. It doesn’t pull me into optimization. It pulls me into reflection.

It doesn’t ask me to perform. It asks me to pay attention.

When I sit with it, something shifts. The anxiety about reach starts to quiet. The low-grade pressure to “get it right” begins to loosen. And in its place, something more useful shows up: honesty.

Do I have an idea that might help someone think differently?

Do I see something that feels true, even if it’s not fully formed?

Am I willing to say it out loud?

That’s a very different posture.

Because when I focus there, imposter syndrome doesn’t disappear, but it loses its authority. It moves to the background. What comes forward instead is a willingness to be seen a little more clearly. To be less polished and more real. And maybe that’s the actual work.

Not building a perfect strategy but developing the courage to say something that matters before you know how it will be received.

The irony is that this is probably the better strategy anyway. People don’t follow frameworks. They follow clarity. They follow resonance. They follow the sense that someone is actually thinking, not just producing.

So for now, I’m making a small shift. In this space, I’m less interested in whether I’m executing a content plan. I’m more interested in whether I’m asking good questions. Whether I’m noticing things that feel worth exploring. Whether I’m willing to share those observations before they’re fully resolved.

That’s the experiment. That’s the design. If that kind of exploration is useful to you, or even just interesting, I hope you’ll keep coming back.

We’ll figure it out as we go.