Ever wondered how to dust off a failed project and turn it into a triumph?
Join Ivan Meakins, on Content Untapped, as he cracks open the secret behind the remarkable transformation of Steven Spielberg's failed project, Night Skies into two cinema classics we all love
Discover how to find the gold in your failures with a simple exercise. Why a fresh perspective can revolutionize your failed projects. And why a second pair of eyes can be the difference between a blockbuster and the garbage bin.
In the world of content creation, no good content ever goes to waste, even if your project tanks!
Reading for this episode:
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If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
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Ever wondered how to dust off a failed project and turn it into a triumph?
Join Ivan Meakins, on Content Untapped, as he cracks open the secret behind the remarkable transformation of Steven Spielberg's failed project, Night Skies into two cinema classics we all love
Discover how to find the gold in your failures with a simple exercise. Why a fresh perspective can revolutionize your failed projects. And why a second pair of eyes can be the difference between a blockbuster and the garbage bin.
In the world of content creation, no good content ever goes to waste, even if your project tanks!
Reading for this episode:
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Hey, what's up guys? This is Ivan Meakin and you are listening to Content Untap, sponsored by Riot Business Results. This is a show where I go on a mission to unpack all those tiny little details that make up fantastic content. I report my findings back to you and I try and give you some practical tips that you guys can take home into your next project. If you do like what you hear, please do all those classic podcasty things you know, like share, subscribe, tell your friends about us all that kind of stuff that helps us spread the word and reach more people just like you, which is awesome. Also, if you wanted to have a more in-depth conversation about what you're hearing today, just hit us up on LinkedIn. You can go to the Riot Business Results LinkedIn page or you can go to my own personal LinkedIn page and Fire as a DM. We can spark a whole conversation there. Thanks, guys. Let's just crack on with the episode.
Speaker 1:In the early 1980s, stevens Bilber was on a roll. He had just finished filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is a fantastic film, and shortly after that he wanted to produce something a little bit more dark, a little bit more sci-fi-y, a little bit more like close encounters of the third kind. So he decided to embark on a new project, one that was already in development, a script called Night Skies. Now, the script of Night Skies is a fairly dark tale about teenagers, a farmhouse and 11 aliens terrorizing Earth. It's a pretty dark tale, kind of different from what he would be normally used to filming, with a few little twists. There's a 10-year-old boy in the film, for example, called Jay Bird, with learning difficulties, and one of the five little terrorist aliens were the villains of the film was actually Plot Twist, a good-natured little alien, an alien called Buddy, and Jay Bird and Buddy begin to form a bond, and that's the kind of plot of the film that unravels. Now this plot may sound eerily similar to a film that we all know and love, and we're going to get there in a second, because Night Skies, for all of its amazing plot work, let's be honest it wasn't that good. It was never going to really win any of the courts.
Speaker 1:In the first place, the plot was fairly weak, so the project tanked and it was scrapped. However, steven Spauberk knew what all great creators know is that no good content ever goes to waste, even if the project tanks. So here's what he did, First things. First, he scrapped the violent aliens idea, took away all of the villainous little extraterrestrials and left with one, then stuck with Buddy, the good-natured ET, and he played on the bond between Buddy and Jay Bird and formed a whole plot around that. A good-natured alien crass-landing into Earth and befriending a 10-year-old boy Sounds like ET, doesn't it? And that's exactly what it was. The plot of Night Skies became that absolute blockbuster that we all know and all loved as kids. And then Steven Spauberk went one step further. He took the darker, more mischievous elements of Night Skies and found a new home in them too. Think about it terrorist little aliens coming around and wrecking people's homes. That was Gremlins.
Speaker 1:Two iconic films were built from the ashes of one failed project. Well, let's be honest, one iconic film and one called Classic, because Gremlins is a little bit like Marmite. Do we love it or hate it? But that's really interesting, right? Because what Steven Spauberk did, he didn't waste a single idea. He just repurposed them and reshaped them and, voila, we had cinema magic.
Speaker 1:And that's what I want to talk about in this episode, right, like, have you ever put your heart and soul into a project and really got excited about it, only to have it crash and burn before your very eyes. It's like taking all that time carefully constructing a house of cards, only to have a gust of wind or perhaps a little toddler running in and just knocking it all down. Work is wasted. For ages I thought. When that happens, you know it's all over. I used to say to myself no one to quit meekins, no one. That project just doesn't have any legs anymore and just scrap it.
Speaker 1:But after hearing the story and after doing a lot of work with clients day in, day out, on their content, I've come to realize something. I come to realize that there's a really valuable lesson in content creation that I've used to breathe new life into my projects and our clients' projects. It's a way to find real value in those dusty projects that are sitting on a shelf, buried. I'm never going to see the light of day again. So what? I told you that every time you're creating content, every time you fall, every time you fail, it's just setting you up for a great comeback. It sounds super cheesy, I know, probably like I'm trying to summon the moaning ghost of Rocky on the streets, but hear me out here, because it really works.
Speaker 1:And even the best storytellers and content creators do it just like we heard from Steven Spielberg right. He shows us that a failed project doesn't mean that the ideas behind it are worthless. They can rise again in a new form and in a different project, maybe even with a different message or a different angle that you didn't think about before. And that's the thing, because in the world of content creation, nothing is truly wasted. Ideas can resurface all the time and become something far, far greater than we could ever imagine. Some of the ideas that I use and I get excited by in the show start off as blogs or social media posts, and they just don't fit that format. Sometimes we just have to sit down and rethink about where their best served. It may not be in the form that we intended them for in the first place, so rather than scrap them, let's find out where the value is.
Speaker 1:And this is a story for so many great ideas and famous projects throughout history. Sometimes, initially, they were only fit for the trash before they got dust off and repurposed. Another great example is Stephen King. When he was struggling to become a professional writer, he was working on the manuscript for his first novel, a novel called A Carry. He was about halfway through this novel when he just got completely exasperated with it. He literally took the manuscript for carry and threw it in the trash. And it's only when his wife, tabitha, a few days later found it in the trash, dusted it off, skimmed through it and found potential in it and encouraged Stephen King to reinvent it, to find a new angle about it and to polish and finish off the project. And what would have happened if he had never done that? Carry became Stephen King's first published novel and gained him worldwide acclaim, launching his career as the author that we all know and love to this day. And one more thing it was also repurposed into a super successful film.
Speaker 1:And this example is what I'm talking about. It kind of underscores the point that a piece of content which was initially seen as worthless by the author can be transformed into something significant and impactful with the right perspective and a little encouragement. So if you've got a content idea that out there that didn't quite work, don't just trash it. Okay, maybe it just needs a new perspective in a different format. Perhaps it's a seed for another project entirely. So let's think about this, right.
Speaker 1:Like a lot of thought leaders and business owners embark on these content projects and get really excited about them in the beginning because it's easy to do, right? The concept of writing a book is so exciting and when you get started it feels really, really good to start putting your ideas on paper. But what happens is if people lose momentum or their message changes, maybe they evolve as a business leader, they lose sight of why they embarked on this project in the first place, and if their message change, they think well, that's it, the project is scrapped. Well, it's not necessarily true, right? Because I guarantee you there's probably loads of good ideas in your book that, with a little reshaping and repolishing, can become amazing standalone pieces of content on their own. We'll give you a great example, right?
Speaker 1:Perhaps in your chapters you tell great stories to enforce a message, a wider message, that your book wants to get across. But if your wider message isn't really necessarily where you want to go anymore, that story probably still holds value in another format. Perhaps you go through a few chapters and find the points that you really like, or some of the phrases or examples or metaphors that you used and really like to begin to weave those into a couple of blogs so you can take some of the ideas that were good and leave the other ones. You can totally repurpose content this way. Or perhaps you started on this book adventure, got really excited about it and then realized that you just don't have enough research or maybe you just don't have enough knowledge to finish it yet, and that shouldn't be a cause for frustration. It could be a cause for celebration, because maybe that content is better used and better repurposed in another format. You could blog about your journey as you continue to learn more and begin to put more pieces together for your book.
Speaker 1:Or perhaps you can start a podcast with the beginning chapters that you started off and begin to start building on your knowledge. That way, too, the more people that you interview, the more topics that you research can accumulate into more knowledge which could actually be used to help you write the book that you couldn't finish in the first place, right, and it also means, if you are podcasting, let's say, to try and build your book. It means when you do finally finish that book and you release that book, you're going to have an amazing hungry audience of people who want to buy it and who want to read it, because you've been forging relationships and building an audience with something like a podcast over the months that it's been taking you to find the knowledge to finish the book, and this is a beautiful way of repurposing content that can not only breathe new life into your project but can create an entire new project at the same time. So let's have a think about that one project that you thought was a failure. Okay, it could be a book, a blog, a podcast.
Speaker 1:We'll do a little kind of recycling exercise here. Dig out that piece of content that you've discarded or shelved. Maybe it didn't meet your expectations at the time. For whatever reason, it didn't fit into your business strategy. When your strategy changed over the course of a year, lots of things can happen that may cause a project to go stale Okay, so it could be a blog draft, maybe a video script or a series of videos.
Speaker 1:It could be a marketing idea, or even like a stale or expired business plan that you've never pitched anyone. Now what we've got to do is we've got to identify the value in that. We've got to look for three valuable points or ideas in this content. There could be a great quote that you used okay, that you can repurpose into an infographic and post on social media. There could be a really interesting statistic or piece of research that you did to enforce a point that you were trying to make Again, could make a great infographic, or could make a great YouTube short or video short. You could record that and present it into camera to engage an audience.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's a few amazing stories in a book that you never really finished, but those stories really hold value for your target audience. Is there another way that you could repurpose that? So, once you find the valuable elements in your discarded content the ones that you really like and the ones that you know can be valuable to your audience, try and brainstorm a few new ways that you can transform those elements into a new piece of content. Maybe that blog draft could become a series of Instagram posts. You could strip it all down for its bare parts. Perhaps the video script that you worked on could be turned into something like a webinar or a series of shorts, because it wasn't really edited in the way that you liked it. But maybe you can strip it down into little 20, 30 second clips and get some value from it that way. Right, there are thousands of combinations that you can use when you think about how you can reuse content and reshape it.
Speaker 1:One really encouraging thing now is, with the emergence of something like chat, gpt and AI, it makes life so much easier to repurpose any content you have lying around. Right? I want you to know what new formula content is going to take. Just pick one of those ideas and run with it. Okay, aim to publish or use this newly recycled content within the next week and see what happens. I'll do the same. I'll take a few dusty ideas that I have off my shelf and I'll begin to post them on LinkedIn as well. So if you wanted to work together on this one or show me any of your regurgitated content or repurposed content, I would love to see it.
Speaker 1:Right, I'll see you next time, and this is a bit of a shorter episode today, but just remember that story from Stephen King right, in the world of content creation, there really is no such thing as wasted content. Every idea, every script, every draft, it all has its value. Otherwise, you wouldn't have done it in the first place. Right, it might not seem like it right now, at the time, but sometimes these failures can morph into massive successes, and what it is. It's all about perspective, and sometimes what you need is you just need another pair of eyes to give you that perspective. Just like Stephen King needed his wife, tabitha to see the potential in Kerry, maybe you just need a partner or a friend or a strategic partner or a coach or anyone to show you the potential that you have in your content, because sometimes it's not always that easy to see it, and that's one thing that I always try and encourage when people are creating content is don't always all the time create an isolation. Sometimes you want to give your ideas to someone else to see what they see in it, and sometimes they can see an amazing potential in something that you never could. So again, if you wanted another pair of eyes on any of the content you think is a failed or wasted project, just DM me on LinkedIn. We can spark the conversation. I'm always happy to help where I can, and I love creating stories. I love making content. So if we can turn what you have your dusty old ideas or your failed projects into something awesome, I'm all for that, all right. So look, just before we wrap up, there's just one final thing that I want to say is that never throw away your work in frustration If you're frustrated with a project, it's mostly because you're getting overly worked up about not feeling confident about finishing it, or maybe you don't have enough knowledge to finish it.
Speaker 1:And those are mostly emotional decisions and sometimes logic can go out the window when you get in those emotional states. So if you become really angry or frustrated with a project, just set it down, sit on it for a couple of weeks, ponder it, think about it and maybe just think about if it's not working for you in that format. Maybe there are other ways that you can split it up and reuse it into different formats and still get great value for you but also give value to your audience. It's not always all about you. If you're frustrated with it because you're not a huge fan of the perfect way that you've told that story, maybe that's not that necessary to engage your audience. So again, it's all about perspective and someone else an audience member or someone close to you may completely see the value in what you're doing. So I would encourage you, don't get frustrated with your work. If you are frustrated with your work, sit on it for a week, maybe run it by a few pairs of vies and think about how you can split it up and repurpose it into a few different formats.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I hope that was useful, guys. Until next time I'm going to be creating content, keep telling awesome stories and I'll see you soon. Bye, hey guys. Thanks again for listening to another episode of Content Untapped. If you are interested in finding out what we're up to at Right Business Results create content to grow an oil audience please do get in touch at info at rightbusinessresultscom and we'll get back to you post haste. Secondly, if you wanted to continue the conversation about creating great content or anything that you're listening to on this show, give us a DM to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page or you can DM my personal page and we can spark up a whole new conversation about any of this stuff. We love having conversations about content, so the more the merrier, guys. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next time.