Interesting Inputs, Interesting Outputs
Curate your days and information diet to produce more distinctive content.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
This model treats published content as the downstream result of a creator's lived experiences and information diet. Instead of trying to appear interesting at the moment of publication, deliberately improve the inputs: pursue varied interests, read selectively, listen to useful conversations, and spend online time in places that expose you to consequential ideas. Capture what surprises or changes your mind, then connect those observations to your existing expertise. The resulting output can cover diverse subjects while remaining authentic because it reflects how you actually spend your time. The mechanism is straightforward: richer experiences and better-selected information produce a larger inventory of original connections, which in turn produces a more interesting public body of work.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain during Steph Smith's explanation of why her diverse Twitter feed evolved with her interests.
Core principles
- 01Interesting content begins with an interesting life.
- 02Your information diet shapes the ideas you can contribute.
- 03Deliberate curiosity produces more varied creative inputs.
- 04Authentic interests create stronger material than manufactured niches.
How to run it
- 1
Audit Your Inputs
List the media, communities, conversations, and experiences that occupy your typical week. Identify which sources repeatedly expose you to useful or surprising ideas.
Pro tip Judge a source by the thoughts it prompts, not merely by how entertaining it feels.
Watch out Consuming more information is not the same as improving your information diet.
- 2
Create Deliberate Variety
Add experiences and sources outside your most familiar subject while preserving enough depth in your primary areas. Follow genuine curiosity rather than random novelty.
Pro tip Choose adjacent fields that can create useful connections with your existing expertise.
Watch out Constant novelty without sustained study can leave you with shallow observations.
- 3
Capture Interesting Signals
Record questions, contradictions, observations, and ideas that change your perspective. Keep enough context to remember why each signal mattered.
Pro tip Capture the tension or surprise, not just a link to the source.
Watch out An unprocessed bookmark collection rarely becomes differentiated content.
- 4
Connect Inputs to Experience
Relate captured signals to work you have performed, beliefs you hold, or problems your audience faces. Publish the connections that reveal a distinctive interpretation.
Pro tip Ask what you can see because of your unusual combination of interests.
Watch out Do not force every personal interest into an audience-facing post.
In the wild
A coding creator deliberately studies remote work, organizational design, and emerging business models while documenting personal experiments. Instead of repeating programming tutorials, the creator publishes observations connecting software skills to new ways of working.
→ The creator develops a broader but still coherent body of work built from genuine interests.
Common mistakes
Manufacturing Randomness
Covering unrelated trending subjects is not the same as cultivating authentic interests. The variety must emerge from what the creator genuinely studies or experiences.
Consuming Without Processing
A large information diet creates noise unless the creator captures, compares, and interprets what was consumed.
Is it for you?
Best for
Creators who struggle to generate distinctive ideas or feel trapped inside a narrow subject area.
Not ideal for
Teams that need tightly standardized content around a fixed, regulated message.
From the transcript
“your outward Twitter feed is inevitably a reflection of the way that you spend your day to day.”
“I do need to a lead an interesting life, but I also like am very, very specific about what I read, the newsletters I subscribe…”
From the episode
The Secret Growth Strategies Behind Spotify's Top Podcasts