Perspective in Content Creation: MINNEAPOLIS IS THE SOUTH AND NEW ORLEANS IS THE NORTH!

Perspective.

Certainly, one of the most important and influential words one needs to understand, gain, and utilize when creating content. But doesn’t the first measure of perspective start with where you are standing? At any given moment? Does it require an acknowledgement of how large the universe is around you? And, most importantly, what does this have to do with our ability to generate effective content?

It’s Everything.

Words alone are never enough to attract, inspire, and maintain interest. Finding common ground that is either most relatable or unexpectedly enlightening can capture not only an audience, but their imagination. How many times have you said in a conversation, “I know where you are coming from” or had that stated to you? On the contrary, it’s always rewarding to hear “I never knew that” or “I never saw it that way before”.

Where were you when you got your most brilliant, creative idea? It could have been a lot of places, but most likely not in a conference room or on a Zoom/Teams call. Maybe, not even in the friendly confines of your home office.

There are examples at every extreme how to gain, change or identify perspective. Let’s look at a few examples so we can start our process with the end objective to develop unique and valuable content.

Perspective in Content Creation

If we contain our business lives within the same familiar box, we tend to do the same for our personal lives. That leaves us with the same four walls to influence our creative process almost every day, this does not give us a new perspective on content creation.

Start simply. Walking is a known, tried and true activity that stimulates our bodies and our brains. Make it regular. Change the route. Even drive (or transit) somewhere different just to alter the familiarity, which causes our brains to work harder. For those who can, travel someplace different, at least once per year. If you’re in a mega-metropolis, get to someplace more rural and less developed.

If you’re in The North, get to The South. Go to a rodeo. Attend a college football game. If you’re in The West, get to The Midwest. Not just Chicago, but Iowa or Minnesota. By experiencing different scenery, speaking with different types of people, you willexpand your perspective. We are a nation made up of many local cultures, which represent not only diversity of geography, of race and religion, but also of thought and ideas. Of traditions and humor. This is where the gold is to be found.

Look into adjacent creative businesses and see what they are doing. To present one of the ‘extreme’ examples, there is a company based in Denton, TX that sends personalized messages on a potato! You read that right. Their tagline is “Make Your Gift Weirdly A-Peeling”. I’m not suggesting replicating that but it’s fascinating to speak with startups and entrepreneurs about the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ they came up with their ideas.

A photorealistic potato wearing teal sunglasses, symbolizing unexpected perspective.

These kinds of actions may not seem to have a direct connection to developing creative content, but for certain, they do, and they will. Oh, it may not show up like a light bulb going off, or a thunderclap of a brain synapse. But collected experiences are all added to our intellect and that’s what drives our own growth and self-actualization.

And after all, unless we are crafting fiction, isn’t the content we create, whether it’s meant to be instructional, promotional, informative, or inspirational, whether it’s for tech, for marketing, or for engineering, isn’t the bottom line that it’s meant to be effective? In order to be effective, it needs to be relatable or enlightening. By expanding our own horizons, however wide you believe they are today, there is plenty of space in this universe to gain new perspectives. The full absorption of our everyday lives with social media and virtual reality has constrained many creatives in ways that we don’t even realize.

That is why, for the people in Winnipeg, the people in Minneapolis are down south, and for the people in Mexico City, the people in New Orleans are way up north.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Master that, and you are on the road to creative freedom.