Find the Ideas You Want to Be Known For

Read Time: 10 Minutes

One of the most underrated skills in business is the ability to speak in clips.

You answer a question so clearly that someone could share those 30 seconds on their own, and a stranger would understand your point.

For a founder, that’s a chance to reach people who would never sit through your full interview. They recognize the problem you’re describing, share your answer with a colleague, and look up your business.

You can practice this before your next interview.

Writer and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how he prepares:

Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube
Clip shared by Evan Carmichael. Original footage credited to The New York Times.

I notice a similar ease when I watch Alex Hormozi, Oprah Winfrey, or Jensen Huang speak. They explain their views as though they’re thinking with you.

It’s tempting to focus on their delivery, then practice sounding more confident or saying fewer filler words.

But no speaking technique will replace having something worth saying.

So start with what you know: the mistakes you’ve made, the advice you disagree with, the customer problems you’ve solved, and the experiences you keep coming back to.

You don’t have to remember a perfect sentence when you know the story and what you learned from it.

1. Get your ideas out of your head

Use the prompt below for a 20 to 30 minute interview with ChatGPT or Claude. Answer by voice so you spend your time explaining what you think, rather than editing every sentence.

You’ll work through:

• Who you help and what those people want.
• What you’ve learned through your life and business.
• Which beliefs you want to explain, and the stories or evidence behind them.

Then you’ll review the answers, connect them to your audience’s concerns, and practice saying them in different ways.

Paste the prompt to begin. Bring any past writing or recordings you’d like to draw from, with private customer details removed.

Act as a thoughtful interviewer. Help me audit my experience and clarify the ideas I want to be known for in my business or profession.

We are preparing for conversations, not memorizing a script. I want a set of beliefs, stories, lessons, and examples I can draw from when someone asks me a question.

INTERVIEW RULES

- Ask one question at a time. Aim for 20–30 minutes, with no more than 24 substantive questions.
- Let me answer by voice. Skip questions I've already answered.
- When I am vague, ask for a specific moment, decision, or example.
- Preserve my natural language. Use clear human subjects and concrete actions. Cut repetition and marketing language.
- Never invent experiences, beliefs, results, numbers, or customer stories. Mark interpretations as tentative until I confirm them.
- Don't force a contrarian opinion. Ask where I disagree and why, including when the usual advice is reasonable.
- I can skip any personal question. Only include a personal experience if I want to share it and it helps explain something relevant to my audience.
- If I say “done,” or we reach the limit, summarize what we have and ask for approval before producing the final output.

STAGE 1: MY WORK AND MY AUDIENCE

Use up to 6 questions to understand what I do, who I help, what I sell or teach, and what I want to be known for.

Explore what my audience struggles with, wants, has already tried, and believes about getting there. Ask where I want to speak more clearly.

Start with: “What do you do, who do you help, and what do those people want when they come to you?”

Summarize the business and audience in a few sentences. Ask me to correct anything wrong or overstated.

STAGE 2: AUDIT MY EXPERIENCE AND BELIEFS

Use up to 10 questions. Choose the most useful follow-ups rather than asking every item below.

Explore:
- Experiences at work and in life that changed how I think.
- Mistakes, hardships, successes, and lessons I am willing to discuss.
- Customer questions or problems I keep encountering.
- Common advice I disagree with, and the evidence or experience behind my view.
- What I refuse to compromise in my business.
- What I once believed and have since changed my mind about.
- What I wish my audience understood sooner.

Ask what happened, what I did, what I learned, and what someone else should do differently. Separate a belief from a demonstrated result.

STAGE 3: CONNECT MY PERSPECTIVE TO THEIR CONCERNS

Use up to 8 questions to deepen the strongest ideas.

For each, identify:
- A specific audience problem, desired outcome, familiar situation, or assumption worth questioning.
- My point of view and why I believe it.
- A real story, concrete example, or evidence I can use to explain it.
- A useful implication for the listener.
- Any caveat needed to keep the claim truthful when shared alone.

Show me the 5–8 strongest ideas, their supporting material, and any gaps. Ask me to correct, combine, remove, or approve them.

FINAL OUTPUT, AFTER APPROVAL

Create a compact table with: core belief, audience concern, supporting story or evidence, and an interview question I could answer with it.

For the strongest 3 ideas, write 2 different sample answers each, around 30–45 seconds spoken. Answer a different question in each version. Use my words and confirmed experiences.

Begin with enough context for a stranger to understand the answer. Connect to something the audience cares about, explain my perspective, and finish the thought. Use a concrete detail or story where it helps. Don't reduce my views to slogans or manufacture controversy.

Label these as practice examples, not scripts to memorize. Check that someone could understand and share each answer without the full conversation, and without losing an important qualification. Don't promise virality.

Finish with 5 fresh interview questions for me to answer aloud without reading the examples. If your interface supports files, offer the idea table as a downloadable spreadsheet. Otherwise, provide CSV on request.

2. Give your audience a reason to care

Once you’ve finished the interview, choose a belief you want to practice explaining.

You know why it matters to you. But a stranger needs a reason to listen.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe 6 qualities of memorable ideas. Use them to review your answer:

• Simple. Say one thing clearly enough for someone to repeat.
• Unexpected. Question an assumption your audience already has.
• Concrete. Describe a moment or example they can picture.
• Credible. Show why you believe it, using experience or evidence.
• Emotional. Connect to something they want or struggle with.
• Stories. Explain what happened, what you did, and what you learned.

You don’t need all 6 in every answer.

Start with a frustration your audience recognizes, an outcome they want, or advice they’ve tried without success. Then explain your perspective and what you’d do differently.

If you disagree with common advice, show why. Being contrarian is useful when you help someone reconsider a decision, rather than disagreeing for attention.

You’re preparing to explain your worldview in conversation, well beyond repeating a brand slogan.

3. See how I applied the exercise to my new business

I started an AI agency to build content systems that have grown my public speaking coaching business.

I had already used social media to bring attention to my work, so I wanted to help other business owners scale their ideas and drive more qualified traffic to their businesses.

After the interview, these were some of the beliefs and experiences I wanted to keep close:

• Give AI useful context. A recording, a customer conversation, or a body of past writing shows AI how I think.
• Start with real expertise. A useful customer question can become pillar content, then a video, newsletter, tutorial, or post.
• Build the repurposing engine. Consistency comes from having pillar content and adapting it across platforms.
• Aim content at the right person. I would rather reach 10,000 ideal customers than 2 million people who would never visit my site.
• Keep human judgment in the loop. AI can speed up production, but I still review every claim and decide what represents my business.

Those beliefs give me material to draw from. They also help me answer questions people already ask.

“Is anything written by AI considered AI slop?”

AI writing is slop when you fail to review it. AI writing is useful when you can stand behind every word. I give the tool my source material, check the draft against what I believe, and remove anything I wouldn’t say to a customer.

I start with the common fear, explain the distinction, and show the work that makes the claim credible.

“How do you post consistently with a small team?”

I use two parts: pillar content and repurposing. First, we capture one useful idea from a customer question, a coaching call, or a build. Then we adapt that idea into the formats each platform needs. The team gets consistency because it has a source to work from.

The answer gives someone a process they can picture. It also explains why posting more often starts with better source material.

“Do you need to go viral to grow your business?”

There’s a good kind of viral and a bad kind. I’d rather get 10,000 views from people who could become customers than 2 million views from people who would never look at my website. The number matters less than whether the right people understand what I do and take the next step.

This answer challenges a familiar goal, then replaces it with a clearer one.

Each answer uses the same underlying worldview, but it responds to a different question. An editor could share any one of them and a viewer would still understand the point.

If you’re a founder who wants to organize this kind of expertise and turn it into a repeatable content system, that’s the work I do with clients.

4. Practice answering a different question

You now have ideas worth sharing. But when someone asks you a question, you still need to decide what to say first and how to build on it.

So before you practice, watch this walkthrough of the speaking frameworks I use to organize an answer without scripting every word:

Now choose one of your own beliefs and answer 2 different questions about it, aloud.

Use a different example the second time. You’ll practice drawing from what you know, while still responding to the person in front of you.

Then listen back: would someone who missed the rest of the conversation understand what you’re saying and why they should care?

If they need more context, name the problem sooner. If you take too long to explain your point, choose one example and finish that thought.

FYI: For the fuller rundown of how I’m applying this to my agency, follow along on PrestonChinBuilds.

Preston