In this presentation, Sally Curtis explains that most creators sit on a vast, untapped reservoir of their own past material—books, keynote decks, training manuals, USB drives, desk notes, and unfinished idea threads. Because creators are too close to their own work, they often overlook its value, especially content that feels "old" or "boring." Curtis argues that this seemingly stale material is actually valuable to new or less‑experienced audiences and can be leveraged for collaborations. She offers practical steps: physically tidy desks and drawers, lay out scattered papers on a large table, map connections between disparate idea fragments, and then transform these clusters into fresh deliverables such as checklists, eBooks, or collaborative pieces. The overall message is that by systematically surfacing and recombining existing assets, creators can extend the life of their work and generate high‑value content with relatively low effort.
Chapters
So let's talk about the power of the existing content. What I find is most people, and this includes me, so the mirror's reflecting at me, most people sit on an absolute goldmine of content. What happens though is, and this even happens to me, is when we sit inside our own jar, we we don't see the label or the content gold that is on the jar, so to speak. So another way of saying that is we can't see our eyebrows because we're so close. So what I wanted to do today was just highlight some of the places in which your content gold is hiding. We all know books, we all know keynote presentations, we've all heard me talk about your training manuals as well. But some of the real gold where you can join ideas together is content often sits in USBs. You might have had a USB that's got some old content in it from before, and I refer to it as older existing because generally when we've sort of moved on from there, we feel that it's old and a bit boring to us. But let me share with you that money is in the boring. I think you've probably heard me say that before. this before. What you've become bored of is now highly valuable to a new audience or an audience that's starting their journey with you. It's also a great way to bring out that content and collaborate with somebody else. Let me go back to my original thought, which was sharing with you where you can find some of this hidden gold. We've all got those piles on our desk of of sheets of paper or ideas where we've unpacked something and got interrupted and didn't quite get back to it, where we've had idea threads where we've started with something. If you take the time on a weekend to tidy out that desk or tidy out those drawers and have a look at some of those content pieces and map it out across a big table, you'll probably find— and this is often the case of the way we work when our clients inundate us with their content— you can actually find that some of those random Random idea threads will actually fit together, and you've actually started to step out your methodology or a concept or a thinking. And if anything's stepped out in that way, you can create checklists, you can create ebooks from it, etc. So there's sorts of different ways in which you can extend the life and the inner genius that you started to unpack and create it into consumable and highly valuable content for your audience.
