Every time I sit down to post , my mind goes blank

Last Wednesday afternoon I was at a café , document open , cursor blinking. Not because nothing had happened to me — because I couldn 't figure out which part of my life was " worth saying ." I told myself I was too ordinary. Nothing special. I 'm guessing you've felt that too.

Whether you 're building a personal brand or freel ancing, the hardest part isn't the skills . It's showing up consistently with something to say. The problem isn't that you have nothing — it's that you don't have a method to pull the scattered stuff out of your head.

What this method is, and who's using it

Dan Koe is a personal brand creator who shared a set of AI prompts during a livest ream — instructions you send to an AI specifically designed to "excav ate your own experiences and perspectives , " not get the AI to make stuff up for you.

My friend Xi aowen , an independent illustrator in Hangzhou, used to agon ize over every Xia oh ongshu post. She ran through this prompt set once, spent about 40 minutes on it, and walked away with 60+ content directions — enough for three months. Her words : "I realized the det ours I thought nobody c ared about were actually the things people related to most ."

There are two places to find the prompts: Dan 's Google Drive folder (free), and the " Remix Room" on cogn itivefingerprint.ai, which has more variations .

What it actually costs to try this today

  • Money: $ 0. Both resources are free, and the free tier of Chat GPT is enough.
  • Time: 30– 60 minutes the first time, about 15 minutes after that .
  • Technical barrier: Copy and paste. No account setup, no technical configuration .
  • First step : Open ChatGPT , paste in the prompt, then answer its questions in your own words.

I got it wrong the first time — I thought I was supposed to have the AI " generate" content for me. Everything it produced was garbage. The actual point is that the prompts make the AI ask you questions, and you answer them. It organ izes what you already know. Flip the direction and the whole thing falls apart.

That said , if you're not doing any content output right now at all, no pressure to try this immediately .

Advice depending on where you are

If you're just starting out and haven 't figured out your direction yet — I'd use this as a " self-inventory " first , not to produce content, but to figure out what real experiences you actually have to talk about. A lot of people spiral into positioning anxiety before doing this step . The order is backwards .

If you already have 1– 2 clients and post occasionally but incons istently — treat this as a monthly "content re stock " session . One afternoon, four weeks of topics sorted . Way less painful than scram bling every time.

If you 're scaling up, starting to bring in a team, or outsourcing content — I 'd use this method to build your own "perspective library" first, then hand it to collabor ators to execute. That way the content still sounds like you. The more you outs ource without this , the more the soul dr ains out of it.