Is your content stale?

Experts, speakers, authors, and other thought leaders: are you still harping on the same concepts as last year and the year before?

Warning signs:

• There are slides in your favorite deck that date back to 2016.
• The technologies you talk about are becoming obsolete.
• Half of the case studies you talk about cite people who’ve since changed jobs (or retired, or died).
• You have no good answer to questions like “Yeah, but what about AI?”
• Your best ideas now fall into two categories: things that everyone already knows, and things that have now been pretty clearly disproven.
• You’ve given the same speech so many times that even you are bored with it.

Time to head out into new territory

What should you concentrate on next?

Your own clients will tell you.

Consider the questions they ask for which you have no answers.

Consider the news you’re reading that reveals something that intrigues you.

Consider the weird late-night conversations with your friends and colleagues that go into territory you’ve never considered.

You could follow everyone else into the same “what’s next” field that they’re all encountering.

Or you could head out into spaces where no one knows the answer yet — building on your expertise, but heading out into the unknown.

Now’s the time to do research on those spaces, find those stories, and map out a whole set of new ideas for yourself.

Change yourself before it’s too late. Because stale content tastes terrible.