Producing Engaging & Useful Content
I have a bit of a complaint…
It’s not really a genuine complaint, but rather an observation. Much of the content on Medium focuses on personal growth. That’s important — and there are a lot of fantastic writers, such as Anthony Moore and Darius Foroux are just two who come to mind focusing on practical tips that drive productivity and flourishing— but some of the Medium articles get a little repetitive.
Let me share a little from personal experience about how to take information and deploy it in such a way that it actually solves problems.
What’s Your Value Proposition?
Everyone has a preference for studying and helping solve a particular issue. Maybe it’s because of an experience you’ve had growing up, or maybe it’s a particular realization you came to. For me, the issue that’s arguably at the top of my mind is human capital: how do we help people realize their full potential and flourish throughout their lives?
Identify the issue that you view as drastically more important than others… and determine what you’re uniquely equipped to bring to the table.
That big question can be approached through a variety of angles. You could be an entrepreneur creating technologies, such as Imbellus or Pymetrics, that help assess competency, providing people with information on where they’re at versus where they might want to be. Or, you could be working at Gallup, a large organization that specializes in helping organizations work more effectively together through, for example, their CliftonStrengths assessment.
My primary approach to promoting human capital focuses on producing ideas that can be deployed in various audiences. For example, my research is often tailored initially for a peer review audience in social sciences journals (e.g., see here for a paper on information technology jobs and industrial composition), but subsequently expanded to other audiences through op-eds and policy documents. For example, this recent op-ed shows how digital jobs are also ranked a lot higher in terms of job satisfaction and Chapter 7 of this past year’s Economic Report of the President investigates the economics of the computer science revolution and the emerging cybersecurity risks.
Detail, Detail, Detail
After identifying your value proposition, figure out specific steps you can take to align your skills with the challenge at hand. Sometimes that means producing content that is a synthesis of existing information, but sometimes that involves producing entirely new content that isn’t out there yet. Either way, you want to ground your writing with useful intelligence.
While the following might not be totally exhaustive, I think there are three steps to follow for producing such content. Let’s work with an example: how do we create vibrant and healthy labor markets?
Step 1: What Do People Already Know?
The cost of living, particularly in large metropolitan areas, is rising rapidly — so much so that residents in these areas are paying a higher share of their income towards rent than ever before. Moreover, housing regulations, like land-use restrictions, have also increased significantly over the past decade.
There’s also increasing economic evidence linking these two forces together: housing regulations drive up the cost of living by reducing the supply of available homes, reducing productivity, and increasing misallocation.
Step 2: What Do People Want the Answer to?
Put simply, how do we create communities that are simultaneously safe and equipped to handle continued technological and demographic change?
Step 3: How Can the Information Be Strategically Deployed?
In one of my working papers titled “Housing Market Regulation and Labor Market Dynamism,” I quantify the effects of housing market regulation on “labor market dynamism” — the amount of entry, relative to exit, in an area’s labor market. I use quarterly data on all core business statistical areas (CBSAs) since 2000, coupled with information on regulation. My results suggest that the increase in housing regulation over the past decade can account for 12–24% of the decline in labor market dynamism over these years.
This is new information that directly helps policymakers make decisions about how to improve their communities, whether it’s on a national or local level. For example, President Trump issued an executive order on June 25 to establish the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing chaired by HUD Secretary Ben Carson. This council will investigate the effects of these regulatory barriers and identify ways of relaxing these constraints for affordable housing. Their recommendations will play an important role in promoting evidence-based policymaking.
In addition to conducting the actual research, which is going through peer review, I also wrote about it for a wider audience in a recent op-ed in The Hill.
Convert Information into Value
One of my favorite books is Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” because it focuses overwhelmingly on creating value. Although some people might interpret his critiques of the “passion hypothesis” — that you should just wait until you find something you’re passionate about — he’s really railing against the view that you should wait around until you find something passionate about. You don’t need to wait: start producing value now.
Moreover, there are often innovative ways to transform things you love learning and doing into professional engagements that add value. For example, Chris Guillebeau provides a number of recommendations in “100 Side Hustles: Unexpected Ideas for Making Extra Money Without Quitting Your Day Job” about how to do just that in the expanding digital economy.
Bottom line: after determining your unique competitive advantage, (i) identify what people already know about the issue, (ii) understand the underlying pain point people are trying to solve, and (iii) produce and strategically deploy the information to the appropriate audiences.
Christos A. Makridis (www.christosmakridis.com) completed his doctorates in management science & engineering and economics at Stanford University and serves as a Digital Fellow at the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy, a non-resident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Cyber Security Initiative, a non-resident fellow at the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion, and a senior adviser to Gallup. The author is an Amazon Affiliate.
