Being a content creator, everyday your life is a struggle to master three things at once: Writer, Public Speaker & Entrepreneur.

Being an educational content creator amps up the difficulty even more!

To lighten your load in 2025, I’m giving you the 5 best tips I found all year, with #5 being my hardest learned lesson, which boosted all 3 areas.

Let’s start with the most essential area. The one that must come before any of the other steps can happen. Writing.

#1 Educational Writer 1: GTFP ASAP

You know that on YouTube, getting to the point as soon as possible is a matter of life and death. People drop off after a minute. Why wouldn’t they? You haven’t proven yet that your video can give them something useful.

This is hard with Educational topics. Complex topics like mindsets, were taking me 2-3 minutes to give enough background to be sure the viewer wouldn’t get lost once I got to the big idea.

I found the solution to this in George Blackman’s educational scriptwriting course: The Board Game Intro.

When you have friends over to play a new board game, you don’t teach them how to play by sitting them down & immediately explaining every single rule in the manual. That’s how you teach your enemies that you’re hoping to get to leave!

No, you’re a kind and wise soul who actually likes people, so you explain the absolute minimum needed to get them started playing practice game, only then explaining the rest of the rules after they’ve had a intro tour to the game, seeing a lot for themselves.

So, instead packing your video introduction with all the info needed to understand your entire video, split it in half. Look at how much is needed to understand your first point, and keep only that info. Then push allll the rest of it to after you’ve completed your first point.

After your first point, when people have a rough guess what’s going on, and now trust that your lesson will be a good one, then give them all that info needed for the rest of your video.

This tip has also had surprise bonus effects on my scripts, raising the emotional charge of simple instructions.

But most importantly, I’m finally able to get to the freaking point within 30 seconds of the start of my video, even with my favorite way out there topics.

#2 Educational Writing 2: Teaching Too Many Lessons

Now that I was explaining my videos in a way interesting enough to watch, it became obvious that I was making a huge mistake about what my videos needed to say.

When I met with Charlie Houpert, he immediately had the answer. But it took a while to understand: YouTube is for Entertainment not Education.

This annoyed me at first. The entire reason I was making a channel was to teach people things I wish I’d known sooner.

Naturally I thought this meant I needed to create excellent lessons. Take these difficult topics and make them easier to understand. More interesting to listen to. If you’re thinking that too, then you’re right where I was.

Finally months later, I realized why Charlie was right. I remembered my own path, and realized that detailed lessons weren’t how I got to where I am today.

It was creators that had slowly built up my trust, like Charlie and Lucas Rockwood. Focusing on convincing me there was value in learning these new things. People like us are smart, and motivated. It’s guaranteed we’ll track down the instructions and learn the how-to part. The sticking point was knowing that these odd and abstract topics had gold waiting at the end of the rainbow.

So I’ve made a big shift in how I teach my topics, and already it feels better. With this clarity it’s both easier to write my scripts, and they feel more packed with truly useful relevance.

3. Speaker: You Should Like Hearing Yourself Speak

With that, people now will want to watch the content you’re making, but your videos will be sabotaged if your speaking skills are shooting yourself in your foot. I’ve clicked off of plenty of guys with an idea I wanted to hear because I couldn’t stand to listen to them.

In fact, one of those guys, was me.

I was determined to fix this, and I spent 2 years and thousands of dollars on speaking training. Finally in October I learned one thing that made such a huge difference, that I finally went from being annoyed by my voice to actually enjoying listening to my videos.

The key was removing a special type of filler words. You already know to remove your ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’. But massively more impactful than that, is removing your Hesitation Words.

These short phrases like “You know”, “Kind of”, and “Like”, are tricky because these words do have useful value sometimes. So a teacher can’t just tell everyone to simply eliminate them entirely. If you haven’t already heard about them, that’s why.

Hesitation words are worse than saying nothing, they actually shout uncertainty & insecurity.

For example if I say “I was supposed to go on a hike but you know I kind of slept in”.

Did I sleep or not? You can’t ‘kind of’ sleep. You either did it or you didn’t!

What the words “you know” and “kind of” tell people, is that you’re embarrassed. That you’re not certain about what you’re saying. It’s a defensive measure to beg the listener to not scold you for wasting their time.

But if you’re not certain your words are worth listening to, why would anyone else waste their time paying attention?

This attitude of hesitation demolishes the audiences interest faster than anything I’ve seen in speaking.

Spend 2 hours to fix that and I guarantee you’ll have a night and day difference. Turning your speaking from an anchor holding you back, to wind in your sails.

#4 Entrepreneur: Education Is Sales

Now that your audience can grow, let’s look at the final end goal of making good videos: building a profitable business from them. The most powerful business skill I found all year, took a winding road through 3 books, multiple webinars, and a whole lot of frustrated cursing (just ask my podcast co-host Ryan).

The skill?

Using storytelling for sales.

But wait, “Sales”? We only care about education! Education is sales. Convincing people your lessons are worth learning, and worth remembering.

The trick with learning to write stories for sales is all the writing advice you find out there is for writing useless entertainment. Advice about writing stories is even worse!

That advice is actually the opposite of what you need to do for functional storytelling. The advice I got actually made it harder to write my scripts. This is when the months of foul cursing began. Sorry again Ryan!

But then after months of banging my head on the advice I got from Matthew Dick’s book Storyworthy, I got to talk with with Matthew to ask him why things weren’t fitting. He pointed out that what I was trying to learn is a different style of writing: Sales writing. Things were finally starting to make sense!

So I read his new book on that style, Stories Sell, then followed that trail to Paul Smith’s Sell with a Story. That one’s written by a businessman, and everything fell into place:

How long should an educational story be? 2 Minutes!

In stories for sales, is there such a thing as have too much emotion? Yes!

How can I revise my stories to have the right amount of each? All those answers.

After all this pain, once I got the hang of it, Functional Storytelling added an enjoyable thread of emotion to my explainer videos. It also improved the sales copy on my website, and even morning standup meetings. Sales Writing gives you more than great retention graphs. This gets your ideas remembered, making them spread, leading you to paying clients.

#5 Big Lesson: Write What You Care About So Much It Scares You

Now with all 3 areas are handled, that brings us to the most powerful lesson of last year, which made an immeasurable boost to all 3. But this lesson was more than a little terrifying to learn.

A few months ago I was sitting on my couch, staring at my MacBook screen, fingers on the keyboard. My hands not moving, but my heart racing.

“Crap, What the hell did I get myself into?”

I wasn’t on a couch. I was between a rock and a hard place.

I’d gotten the opportunity to check off one my top life goals: talk with my hero, the man himself, Charlie Houpert. The founder of Charisma on Command had agreed to do a coaching call with me. But I’d realized the script I was planning to review with him was unacceptable.

I’d started my YouTube channel making videos about topics that were easy for me. Like whiskey, or how to build a nice recording studio. But they came across flat. Empty. Because this wasn’t what I truly wanted to teach, it was just the maximum I could make with what courage I had.

Reading the script I had, I was ashamed of how unimportant its goal was. It hit me that if I never got another shot to speak with him, I’d regret wasting it by not working on the the topics I truly cared about.

But that was a much harder topic to write. That was a difficult to explain lesson, that I had learned from trying to connect with my father. One that had changed my life. But one even further beyond my writing abilities. Since Charlie was the #1 person in the world I wanted to make a good impression on, this harder topic ramped up the level of fear from scary to terrifying.

Sitting in front of my keyboard, staring that fear full in the face for the first time, that crucible of fear itself taught me the first half of this lesson:

I realized that no matter how frightened I was, no matter how large the stakes, I would rather go down in flames trying the build thing that truly mattered to me, than win playing it safe hiding behind something else.

That realization felt amazing, and poured a whole new level of fire into my work.

My fingers began to move. The mad dash to write that script began.

By the day of our meeting, just preparing for it had taught me so much, but there still remained the obvious problem that I while I loved this topic, I wasn’t enough of an expert to teach it. And that would take years. But like the expert I expected, Charlie taught me the solution, and only needed 30 seconds to do it.

I started: “Sorry this script is really rough. To tell the truth, trying to teach these things that I still suck at feels pretty embarrassing. But I didn’t want to waste this opportunity, so I had to try”

He told me: “First of all, that was a really good call picking the topic you care about most. Sincerity and vulnerability are the true currency of YouTube. And right now it’s becoming even more so.”

I felt really good about that.

But what he said next stopped me in my tracks.

“But I have to ask, what makes you say you suck at it? That you’re not good enough at it to teach it?”

I’d never asked myself that question. The answer was so obvious, I never needed to.

But it hit me like a punch in the chest: I didn’t have an answer.

I started laughing, with embarrassment and relief.

“I’d been applying these ideas everyday for years. My life had changed night and day different because of it. Each of my friends had pointed out how much I’ve changed. And most important of all, I’d become the happiest & most fulfilled that I’d ever been in my life.”

With that one question, Charlie taught me the second half of the lesson: your topic being the most important thing to you, is itself the very credentials you needed. There’s nothing holding you back.

Today, start working on the topics that matter so much to you they scare you. It’s the most powerful change I made all year, improving all 3 areas of my creator work.

Now if you’re ready to start working on your most powerful topics, you might find that figuring out what topics are most important to you, can actually be pretty hard.

In this article, I show you how get clarity on what your deepest motivations are. And those reveal clearly what topic is most important to you.