The 4-Prompt System That Turned My Random Observations Into Endless Content.
No more staring at blank pages wondering what to write about.
My buddy flew in from Miami last week.
Cuban guy. Touched snow once in his life.
He wanted to go skiing.
I told him to take a lesson. He said he didn’t need one.
First run. I’m ahead of him, carving down the slope. I turn back to check on him.
Yard sale.
Skis halfway up the hill. Poles gone. Him face down in the powder.
Ski patrol brought him down on a toboggan. One run. His first. Probably his last.
He’s fine now. Sprained ankle. Pride’s a little bruised.
Here’s why I’m telling you this:
That story just taught you more about overconfidence than any definition ever could.
You felt it. You saw him face down in the snow. You winced.
THAT’S the power of story.
And most content creators are leaving it on the table every single day.
Today I’m going to show you how to extract stories from your everyday life and turn them into content that actually resonates. I’ve built prompts that do the heavy lifting for you. By the end of this, you’ll have a repeatable system.
The Story Problem
You’ve been told to “provide value.” Share tips. Teach frameworks. Drop knowledge bombs.
So you do.
And nobody engages.
Your posts read like textbooks. Accurate. Helpful. Forgettable.
Meanwhile, some guy shares a story about his kid spilling cereal and gets 400 comments.
What’s going on?
Here’s what psychology tells us: the human brain is wired for narrative.
Facts inform. Stories transform.
When you read a statistic, your brain processes it. When you read a story, your brain SIMULATES it. Mirror neurons fire. You’re not just reading about my buddy in the snow. Part of your brain is lying face down in that powder with him.
That’s not metaphor. That’s neuroscience.
The creators who understand this have an unfair advantage. Every experience they have becomes content. Every frustration. Every small win. Every awkward moment.
The rest are staring at blank pages wondering what to write about.
Why You Think You Have Nothing to Say
You do have stories. Plenty of them.
You’re just not capturing them.
Yesterday you had a conversation that made you think. Last week something frustrated you. This morning your kid said something that stopped you cold.
All of it disappeared.
Not because it wasn’t valuable. Because you don’t have a system to catch it, process it, and turn it into something your audience wants to read.
That’s what I’m giving you today. A method and the prompts to run it.
The Debrief Method: CAB
Collect. Analyze. Brief.
Three steps that turn your daily life into a content engine.
Step 1: COLLECT
Throughout your day, capture raw observations.
No filtering. No judgment about whether something is “content worthy.” You’re not writing yet. You’re logging.
One sentence per observation. That’s it.
“Spent 20 minutes looking for a file I saved last week”
“Client said yes after I stopped explaining and just asked what they needed”
At the end of the day, five minutes. Distill your notes into two bullets:
One thing that worked
One thing that created friction
This is your raw material.
Step 2: ANALYZE
Here’s where most people bail.
They have observations. They just can’t see the universal inside the personal.
They write about what happened TO them instead of what their reader can LEARN from them.
Analysis bridges that gap.
You’re looking for two things:
The underlying tension (what was really happening beneath the surface)
The universal struggle (who else deals with this same friction)
My buddy’s ski disaster? On the surface it’s about skiing.
Underneath? Overconfidence. The gap between past success and new domains. The cost of skipping fundamentals.
THAT’S the content.
One observation can spin into multiple angles. A mistake to avoid. A counterintuitive truth. A lesson most people learn the hard way.
I’ve built a prompt that runs this analysis for you. You paste in your observations, it spits out angles you can write about. Takes sixty seconds.
Step 3: BRIEF
Now you package one insight for delivery.
Your story is the vehicle. Their takeaway is the cargo.
The structure:
Hook (pattern interrupt)
Setup (ground them in the scene)
Turn (the shift)
Insight (what THEY walk away with)
CTA (one clear next step)
When this is done right, your reader doesn’t think “cool story.”
They hit reply.
There’s a prompt for this too. You feed it your angle and your raw observation, it gives you a structured outline. You expand from there.
What This Looks Like in Practice
5:30 AM. You’re at your desk. Coffee’s going cold.
You pull up yesterday’s notes. There’s one line about a conversation with your daughter. She asked why you work so early.
You run the prompt.
Sixty seconds later, you have four angles to choose from.
You pick one. You write 400 words. You schedule the post before the house wakes up.
No staring at a blank page. No waiting for inspiration. No hoping something interesting happens to you.
You already lived the content. Now you have the method to extract it.
Get the Full Prompts
I’ve built out the complete Debrief Method with ready-to-use prompts for each step:
The Collection Debrief prompt (turns scattered notes into organized raw material)
The Analysis prompt (extracts universal angles from personal observations)
The Brief prompt (structures your insight for maximum impact)
The Repurpose prompt (adapts one piece across Twitter, LinkedIn, newsletters, and video)
Paid subscribers get all four below.
Copy. Paste. Run.
Upgrade to get the complete Debrief Method prompt pack →
