Peter WinickFounder and CEO @ Thought Leadership Leverage

How do you go from evergreen to topical and topical to evergreen?

8 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:19

In this brief monologue, Peter Winick, founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, explains that all thought‑leadership content contains both evergreen elements—timeless truths that remain valid regardless of market conditions—and topical elements that rise or fall in demand based on current trends (e.g., stock market direction, remote‑work prevalence, DEI focus). He poses the strategic challenge of converting evergreen material into timely, topical pieces, and conversely, reshaping currently topical topics into evergreen assets that retain relevance after a fad fades. He ends by inviting audience feedback on approaches to this conversion.

Chapters

Hi there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. Here's the idea that I'd like to share with you today, and that's this: everybody's thought leadership, everybody's content if you will, has elements of it that are evergreen. What do I mean by that? I mean there's an element of timelessness to that, and that there are pieces of the thought leadership that are true regardless of what's going on in the world at a moment in time. Is the stock market going up? Is the stock market going down? Are we living in a work-from-home environment, or is DEI in vogue these days or not in vogue these days? Whatever it is, there are components of your work that will always be true regardless of what's going on. Then there are elements of your work that, due to nothing that you can do, um, become more or less in demand based on what's going on in the world, right? More topical. So the challenge, the question is, how do you take what is evergreen and make it topical? And then oftentimes the other way, how do you take something that is topical today, it's top of mind today, and convert it back into being evergreen so that there'll be a market for it when the fad fades, when it's not as in vogue as it is today? Love to hear your thoughts as always.