A 31-minute whiteboard walkthrough of the four decisions that happen before a single sentence of a script gets written.
Posted
2 months ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
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379
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
The topic sets the ceiling on how far a video travels, so good scripting is a sequence of narrowing decisions: find a proven topic, reduce it to one simple idea, and open broad before you go niche.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach, consultant, or expert posting short-form video who gets steady but flat view counts and cannot tell which part of the process is failing.
Someone who writes fine sentences but keeps picking subjects that nobody stops scrolling for.
A creator who over-explains, tries to cover everything they know in one video, and keeps attracting peers instead of buyers.
Anyone using ChatGPT or Claude to write scripts and getting output that reads generic no matter how the prompt is worded.
SKIP IF…
You want hook formulas and power-word lists; the argument here is that those are the least useful part of the process.
You are already selecting topics from platform data and just want editing or production technique.
You are looking for platform-specific tactics; everything here is framed around a generic recommendation system, not any one app's rules.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Scripting fails upstream of the writing. The argument here is that the topic sets the ceiling on reach, because people scroll subconsciously and stop on subject matter, not on craft. So topics should be sourced from what an audience already rewards on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok rather than from what they say they want. Each proven topic then gets cut to one narrow idea, because explaining everything you know attracts peers and overwhelms beginners. Structure follows the recommendation system: a broad hook to survive the first test batch, a narrower body to keep serious viewers, and a niche ending that filters for buyers. AI only enters at the end, filling gaps between decisions a human already made.
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Four principles promised, credibility stated in one line, no preamble.
00:25 – 05:40
02 · Principle 1: topic selection
The topic sets the ceiling. Original sourcing from intuition and sales calls versus proven sourcing from platform data, and why the subconscious scroll decides.
05:40 – 09:36
03 · Principle 2: simplify the idea
The expert fallacy of explaining everything, the bell curve meme, and cutting one proven topic down to one narrow subtopic.
09:36 – 10:57
04 · Principle 3: hook, body, ending
The theory section opens. Every video has three parts, and you cannot structure them until you know what the feed rewards.
10:57 – 15:34
05 · How the algorithm actually works
Screen time is revenue, so the feed is a matching engine. Content fingerprints, user fingerprints, and the escalating 100 to 500 to 2000 test ladder that sets a video's ceiling.
15:34 – 18:37
06 · Broad, narrow, niche
Broad hook to survive the first test batch, narrower body to hold serious viewers, niche ending to filter for buyers rather than flood the funnel.
18:37 – 21:52
07 · Principle 4: mapping the script
Topic, subtopic, hook, body, and ending get mapped as separate decisions. Two different hook paths depending on whether you already write them well.
21:52 – 26:48
08 · Copy until you see the patterns
The 12-year-old music producer story. Ripping beats off live streams for six to twelve months taught the underlying patterns, and rewriting other people's hooks does the same thing.
26:48 – 30:43
09 · Dictate the body, let AI fill the gaps
Wispr Flow to talk the body out loud, then hand ChatGPT or Claude the topic, reasoning, hook, body, ending, and a word count, and have it connect the dots.
30:43 – 31:28
10 · Recap and call to action
The four principles restated, a positioning line about breaking personal branding into simple steps, then a book-a-call link.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
The best copywriters in the world cannot rescue a video about a topic people fundamentally do not care about.
People scroll past perfect lighting, good gear, and strong hooks all day; what stops the thumb is the subject.
What an audience says it wants comes from the conscious mind, but scrolling happens subconsciously, so ask the data instead of the audience.
A subreddit where your buyers argue about the same thing every week is a better topic source than any sales call.
Explaining everything you know does not signal expertise to beginners, it signals that the video is not for them.
Covering your whole domain in one video attracts competitors, because only your peers can follow it.
A platform's feed is a matching engine optimized for screen time, not a quality judge.
Every upload gets a content fingerprint and every user gets an interest fingerprint; distribution is just those two being paired.
Videos are released in escalating test batches, and the first batch that responds badly is your ceiling.
Broad means broad inside your niche; going broad across niches corrupts the fingerprint and sends the video to the wrong people.
If you keep the whole video broad, the viewers worth keeping read it as surface level and leave.
An unqualified following is worse than a small one, because an audience with no intent to buy still costs you reach.
Hook tutorials give you vocabulary, not judgment; the patterns only register after you have rebuilt enough examples yourself.
Copying beats taught music production in six to twelve months, and rewriting hooks works the same way.
AI produces generic scripts when you ask it to invent the idea, and useful ones when you ask it to connect decisions you already made.
Treat the first AI draft as a six out of ten and fix it by naming the specific logical flaw, not by re-prompting from scratch.
Takeaway
Topic choice decides how far a video travels.
WHAT TO LEARN
Reach is set upstream of the writing, by what you choose to talk about, how narrowly you cut it, and how early you let strangers recognize themselves in it.
02Principle 1: topic selection
The topic sets the ceiling on a video's reach, so even the best writers in the world cannot rescue a subject nobody cares about.
People scroll subconsciously and stop on subject matter, not on lighting, camera gear, or a clever opening line.
Proven topics come from watching what an audience already repeats and rewards on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, not from asking them what they want.
Asking surfaces conscious preferences while platform data shows where attention actually goes, and the two frequently disagree.
03Principle 2: simplify the idea
Explaining everything you know signals expertise to peers and overwhelms beginners, so a complete answer attracts competitors instead of customers.
One proven topic should become one narrow subtopic, such as a three-step protocol, rather than a tour of every adjacent subject.
Complexity is not depth; the middle of the bell curve over-explains while both ends pick one simple idea and ship it.
04Principle 3: hook, body, ending
Every video reduces to three jobs: the hook buys attention, the body delivers the value, and the ending converts or concludes.
Structure decisions only make sense once you know what the distribution system rewards, which is why the frame comes before the writing.
05How the algorithm actually works
Platforms optimize for watch time because screen time is revenue, so the feed is a matching engine rather than a quality judge.
Each upload gets a content fingerprint from its visuals, audio, captions, and metadata, matched against each viewer's interest fingerprint.
Distribution happens in escalating test batches, and the first batch that responds poorly becomes the ceiling for that video.
06Broad, narrow, niche
Broad means broad inside your niche; drifting off-topic corrupts the fingerprint and routes the video to people who will skip it.
A hook that stays niche loses the early test batch, because too few of those first viewers recognize themselves in it.
Keeping the whole video broad costs you the serious viewers, who read surface-level coverage as permission to leave.
07Principle 4: mapping the script
Scripting starts by mapping the topic, subtopic, hook, body, and ending as separate decisions before any sentence gets written.
If you already write hooks that land, the only change worth making is pointing that existing skill at proven topics.
08Copy until you see the patterns
Hook tutorials teach vocabulary, not judgment; the underlying patterns only register after you have rebuilt enough examples yourself.
Rewriting other people's hooks into your own subject matter trains pattern recognition the way copying beats teaches music production.
Expect six to twelve months of deliberate copying before the patterns turn into intuition you can generate from scratch.
09Dictate the body, let AI fill the gaps
Dictation captures the examples, analogies, and asides you would never type, which is where the human texture of a script lives.
AI works when you hand it your topic, reasoning, hook, body, and ending and ask it to connect them, not when you ask it to invent the idea.
Give the model a word count matched to the platform, then treat the output as a six-out-of-ten draft you fix by naming specific logic and flow problems.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Proven topic
A subject that already shows repeated engagement in a niche, found by studying what performs on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn rather than by guessing or asking the audience directly.
Original approach
Sourcing video topics from your own intuition, sales calls, or direct customer requests. It reflects what people consciously say they want, which may not match what they actually watch.
Digital fingerprint
The machine-readable profile a platform builds from a video's visuals, audio, captions, and metadata, used to decide which viewers it should be shown to.
Test batch
The small initial group of viewers a platform shows a new video to before deciding whether to expand its reach. Performance in each batch determines whether the video moves to a larger one.
Broad, narrow, niche (BNN)
A structural rule for scripts: the hook should appeal to everyone in your niche, the body should go deeper for serious viewers, and the ending should speak only to the ideal customer.
Hook, body, ending
The three sections every video has. The hook buys attention, the body delivers the value, and the ending is either a conclusion or a call to action.
ICP
Ideal customer profile. The specific type of person a creator wants to attract and eventually sell to, as distinct from the general audience a video might reach.
Wispr Flow
A dictation tool that transcribes speech into whatever application is in focus, used here to talk through a script outline instead of typing it.
“You have to talk about a topic that people fundamentally don't care about. They wouldn't be able to do it, because the topic is the precursor of all of the success a video can get on social media.”
the thesis in one breath, with a built-in thought experiment→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
01:44
“They've scrolled past many videos with amazing lighting and amazing camera gear and a very good hook. But they scrolled past it. Why? Because they didn't care about the topic.”
reframes gear and craft anxiety in three sentences→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
04:25
“Which one would you rather make content for? The conscious mind or the subconscious mind?”
direct question, no setup needed, works as a standalone hook→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
06:40
“If you talk about all of these things you're not going to attract your ideal audience, you're going to push them away. Who you're going to attract is your competitors.”
counterintuitive and stings in a useful way→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
12:00
“It works as a giant matchmaking algorithm.”
one-line mental model for a whole section→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
15:05
“That is the ceiling of your video. That is why some videos seem to be prioritized by the algorithm. It's just because the subset of people who've watched it responded positively to it.”
answers the single most common creator question→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
18:20
“That is when you get an audience of people who have no intention of buying from you, and what we want is creating a following of actual buyers.”
the business reason the niche ending exists→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
24:00
“If you don't understand how to make a good hook right now, don't watch a tutorial on how to make a good hook.”
contrarian, self-aware, and lands immediately→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
23:40
“All because I copied my way to understanding the patterns that fundamentally made good beats.”
the story payoff in one sentence→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
29:50
“Write the script for me. Write about visual fat now and make sure to make it good. I promise you it's not going to work when you do it that way.”
names the exact mistake most people make with AI→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
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Today, we're talking about scripting. If you want your content to perform better, you have to focus on leveling up your scripts. But the truth is, to write significantly better scripts, you don't need a secret formula.
Funny enough, you don't even have to be that great of a writer. You just need to understand the four principles that makes or breaks a script on social media. And in this video, I'm breaking all of them down.
My name is August, and I've generated hundreds of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers all through content. Okay, so the first principle is something that comes way before you even start scripting the actual video. It's topic selection.
Topic selection. Because if you hire the best of the best, the world's most talented copywriters, I mean, the writers that are the best at understanding social media and the algorithm and all the left stuff, if you hired them and put them all in one room, and gave them one main objective write the most viral script you possibly can the one that gets the most likes comments views engagement followers all of that good stuff but you gave them one constraint you have to talk about a topic that people fundamentally don't care about they wouldn't be able to do it because the topic is the precursor of all of the success a video can get on social media if you can take one thing from this video right here It is that the topic is the thing that matters the very most.
Because I could teach you about scripting and everything I'm going to talk about in this video. I could talk about all of that. But you wouldn't see any success because of that if you didn't understand topic selection.
Right? Because the thing is, people scroll on social media. And they scroll subconsciously.
They just scroll, scroll, scroll. And when they stop... It's because they care about the topic that the person in the video, the creator here, are talking about.
Because before this, they've scrolled past many videos with amazing lighting and amazing camera gear and a very good hook, etc. But they scrolled past it. Why?
Because they didn't care about the topic. And when they stop, it's because they care about the topic or it resonates with them or they can relate to it. So the topic right here is the most important thing you can understand about all of social media.
Right, so how do you come up with topics that actually resonates with your audience, that people actually care about? There are two approaches here. You can do the original approach and you can do the proven approach.
The original approach here is when you look at your sales calls, you see this thing keeps coming up. So I'm going to talk about that. Or you talk to your customers and they say, hey, I want you to talk about this in your videos.
Or you may have an intuition yourself. Okay, I should probably talk about this. This seems like a good thing to talk about.
That's the original approach. The proven approach is that you look at Instagram. You look at YouTube.
You look at Reddit. You look at TikTok. Look at LinkedIn.
You look at all of these platforms here. And you just study them. You see, okay, this topic in my niche keeps popping up and it keeps performing very well.
You go to Reddit. You see this subreddit here where my ideal audience hangs out. They keep talking about this one thing over and over and over again.
That is a topic that is proven to work. Because it keeps showing up and it keeps getting views and it keeps being talked about in the subreddits. Now, the original approach, the reason why I'm not a big fan of it and I like the proven approach better is because people have two states of mind when they tell you what they want to watch, what topics they want you to talk about.
They have the conscious mind and they have the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is when they think about it and say, I want you to talk about this or this or this. But the issue with that is what they say to you may necessarily not even correlate to how they behave on social media when they are stop conscious.
But when you look at this right here, the proven approach, you look at how they actually. spend their attention on social media. They keep watching these topics and these topics and these topics, but they weren't necessarily something that they spoke about.
Which one would you rather make content for? The conscious mind or the subconscious mind? I would rather make content for the subconscious mind because people are subconscious when they scroll on social media.
People aren't consciously going in and saying, I want to watch this video. No. They're opening the app and seeing, okay, this thing pops up.
i'm just gonna watch it right so i'm a way bigger fan of the proven approach now i'm not saying that the original approach cannot work i'm just saying here you're backing everything that you are talking about on social media you're backing it up by actual data and you're backing it up by what they're actually voting with their attention on that they want to watch right so this is the approach that i like to use when coming up with topics that people care about now if you've never done this before like topic selection even just taking the original route will increase your views but if you take the proven route here i guarantee you you're gonna get a lot better results on your social media now the next principle i want to talk about is simplifying your videos when you found the topic here let's say you're a fat loss coach you look up Instagram, you look up Reddit, you look up YouTube, and you keep seeing this one thing.
Visual fat. How to lose visual fat. Right?
The biggest mistake I see a lot of experts making when they found this, so they found the topic that is proven to work, which is visual fat. They think to themselves, if I'm going to be perceived as an expert, I have to explain everything I know about it.
I know about what supplement stack you have to take. I know about what exercises and training program you have to take. Understand the nutrition that you need to follow in order to lose this visual fat.
Understand the sleep protocol that you have to follow. Understand all of this. And if people need to see me as an expert, I need to talk about all of these things.
But that's not the case. Because your ideal... audience is most likely not someone who is at the same level as you they don't understand nutrition or visual fat or exercises or supplements as well as you do so the fallacy here is if you talk about all of these things you're not going to attract your ideal audience you're going to push them away because they're going to be overwhelmed who you're going to attract is your competitors people who are also a fat loss coach or whatever you are who are attracting that type of person because you're talking in a way where it's only the top one percent that can understand it so please when you have the overall topic yes you can note down you understand the supplement stack you can note down all of these things right here that's great but don't try to include all of them into one video please don't do that what you should do instead is simplifying it so you understand okay this is a proven topic how can i make a simple video where i'm talking about this that can actually benefit my icp it may be the three -step training protocol to lose visual fat that is a way more simple idea than talking about all of these other things right because the thing is you've probably seen this meme before like the bell curve here let's just draw it here this is the bell curve on this side we have the
idiot right this is just like the idiot he's just happy and dumb and then we have the person up here which is the try harder so this right here this is the try harder and over here we have the cool dude the jedi this is just the person who is just he understands his stuff right what these two here have in common is they have a topic they want to talk about They just make a simple video about it, but this person up here.
He's the one saying oh I need to talk about sleep protocol nutrition training protocol Supplement stacks all of that stuff they over complicated so much to the point where they overwhelmed everyone who is watching the video and that's not what you want to do you want to be this person because the difference between This person right here and this person right here is that this person he doesn't back any of his decision up by data But this person right here he finds a proven topic and he makes a simple video about it So you have to come up with a simple video.
Imagine this is like this storyline of your video. You have to come up with a simple video and instead of diverging here to talk about another topic or another topic or another topic or another topic or another topic. You don't want to do any of that.
You find the proven topic. You just make a simple video about it. And stick to it.
Now the third principle I want to talk about is the theory of scripting a Good video. Right, that was very long.
I couldn't bother writing all of that. The theory of scripting a good video. Boom.
This is not like a step -by -step practical approach to writing the script. We're going to get into that in the last principle. This right here is just understanding the theory behind it.
Because before you can write a good script and a script that gets a lot of views, you have to understand the theory, right? We've gone through the topic selection, the importance of that. We've gone through...
why you need to have a simple approach to writing them now we want to be able to write this proven topic simple idea into a structure that is actually working with the algorithm instead of against it now just so you can understand this we're gonna divide the structure of the script here into three phases we have the hook here we have the body here and we have the ending here the hook is obviously what grabs the attention.
The body is the value, the meat of the video. The ending is either the CTA or the conclusion of the video. Right.
That is the three sections that fundamentally all videos follow. Everything has a hook. It's just the intro.
Everything has a body. It's the main section, value, meat of the video. And everything has an ending.
It's the CTA or the conclusion. Right. Cool.
to understand how to optimally write a hook a body and ending we have to understand how the social media algorithm works so i'm just going to explain that now bear with me to understand how it works we have to understand how social media makes money because the algorithm is designed so the social media platforms can make more money and the way they make more money is if you spend more time on the actual platform the higher screen time is on instagram or youtube or whatever the more money they make so the algorithms want to keep you on the platform for as long as possible and the way that they do that is by feeding you more videos that it thinks you would enjoy because think about it when you keep seeing videos on your feed that you just love you stay on the platform but if you start seeing videos that you don't really care about that is when you close down the app, right?
So the algorithm is optimized for that, feeding you videos that it thinks you will like. Same for everybody else, right? So it works as a giant matchmaking algorithm.
So everybody, or the ones that create content, they create a piece of content. And when you upload a piece of content, the first thing that happens is that the social media platform gives it a digital fingerprint. So it watches the videos, it...
It listens to the sounds, it looks at the captions, it understands the video, all of the metadata of the video. It turns that into a fingerprint. And with that fingerprint, it puts it into a matchmaking machine.
This is like the matchmaking machine. And then what it does is it understands the video. What's it about?
It understands the fingerprint, the digital fingerprint of the video. And it wants to match that with someone who is interested in the things that you are talking about here that it deems as someone who would like it. And the way it does that is every user on social media also has a fingerprint.
It knows that you like politics. It knows that you like fitness or you like cooking videos, etc. It has a fingerprint of you.
And what it does then is it takes you here and it understands that you like fitness or you on a fat loss journey or whatever. And this person here is talking about how to lose visual fat. Okay, it's going to pair that with you.
Right. It's a matchmaking machine because this video is about visual fat and it understands that you are likely to like a video about visual fat because you are on a fat loss journey, for example. Right.
But it doesn't just push this video to millions of people. Duh. If that was the case, you would have millions of views on every single video.
No. What it does is it pushes it out to a small subset of people first because that is a lot less risky for the platform. Because it can see like, okay, how well do people respond to it here?
versus just pushing it out to millions of people, it's a big risk. Obviously, the size of this first initial testing round of viewers depends on your size of the account, your previous views and all of that stuff. But let's just for simplicity sake, say that it is a 100 viewers, the initial test group.
Then what happens is, these videos here are being matched, this video here, sorry, is being matched with 100 people. And it gets a score based on how well these 100 people interact with the video. If they watch the video for a long time, they don't instantly scroll, they like the video, they comment, they engage, etc.
It gets a positive score. But on the other hand, if it gets skipped a lot, people don't really watch it, they don't engage with it, it gets a negative score. So it starts with the 100 people.
If it gets a positive score, It's being pushed on to more people. Let's say 500 here.
And again, it gets a score. If it's positive, then it gets pushed on to even more people. Let's say 2000 people again gets a score.
It's a good one. Then it gets pushed on to even more people. And it keeps continuing like this until the platform sees, okay, now a lot of people.
didn't engage positively with it they just scrolled past it and it gets a negative score that is the ceiling of your video that is why some video seems to be prioritized by the algorithm etc it's just because the subset of people who've watched it responded positively to it right so knowing all of this we know how the algorithm works we can actually script the hook the body the ending in a way where it works in tandem with the algorithm instead of against it.
This is how you get the algorithm to actually prioritize your content. And the way I like to do this is by following a concept called broad, narrow, niche. Narrow, niche.
And what we want to do here is have the hook being broad. And now when I say broad, I'm not just saying as broad as possible, like talking about something that everybody in the entire world cares about.
No, because you have a digital fingerprint. Remember that. And you want to be matched with people who also care about fat loss.
That's just the example here. So you want to make the hook as broad as possible to the group that is interested in fat loss. You don't want to make it about politics, et cetera, because the fingerprint is going to be messed up and you're going to be pushed to people who aren't your audience.
And people who wouldn't care about losing visual fat. So you want to make the hook as broad as possible within the niche that you are in. And the reason why you want to do that is if the hook is broad, the subset of people here are more likely to care about it.
There's more people every time it gets pushed that are likely to care about it. Whereas if it's extremely niche, you can imagine that it's only a small... percentage of these 100 people that would care about it and the instagram algorithm or youtube algorithm just sees this and say a lot of people didn't really like this video so it's probably not a good video and it could be an amazing video but it's just too niche in the beginning so we want to keep the hook broad and then you may ask why wouldn't we just keep the entire video broad if that's how you get pushed on social media and the reason why we don't want to do that is If you keep it broad through the body, the people who would actually be your ideal followers would be turned off.
Because they would think, okay, this is just super surface level. This is so broad. This is super generic.
There's no reason for me to watch the rest of the video. There's no reason for me to watch this person over this other person who actually goes into detail with what he's talking about. Right?
So you want to give your ideal audience a chance to actually understand that you have something to give them. You want to give them a reason. to stay and watch the rest of the video and it's the same thing with the niche thing here the reason why you want to keep it niche here is because you don't want to flood your funnel or your following with people who aren't qualified so this is why you go the most niche as possible you essentially call out the ideal customer you have here because the issue is if you also keep this too broad here you're going to get a lot of people going through your funnel who aren't qualified you're going to get a lot of people inside your following who aren't qualified and that is when you get an audience of people who have no intention of buying from you and what we want is creating a following of actual buyers So this is how you structure your videos and like the theory of how to script these videos where it actually works with the algorithm instead of against it.
Now the fourth and final principle is the actual approach on how to script the videos. And the reason why I didn't start with this is if you didn't first and foremost understand topic selection. none of these approaches to scripting videos would matter because the topic wouldn't matter and people wouldn't care about the videos.
If you didn't understand that you have to simplify your videos and your video ideas, this wouldn't matter either because it would be too complex and you would turn away all of the people that you wanted to attract. And third, if you didn't understand the framework that was scripted within, none of this would make any sense for you.
Right. So the final thing we want to do here is take everything here and turn it into the script. So we start with the topic.
That was visual fat that we used as an example here. Then we take the subtopic, the way that we simplify the video. That was the three -step training protocol to lose this visual fat.
And then we want to map out the video as the first thing in the scripting approach. with the BNN approach, the broad narrow niche approach. So this is essentially the hook.
That is the first thing we want to map out. Second, we want to map out the body. And third, we want to map out the ending.
Let's start with the hook. Now, I may have a different approach to hooks than a lot of other people.
my approach is it depends on where you're at do you already know how to script have you made videos that have gone viral before then and maybe you're struggling as of lately then you already know how to make good hooks you have this sense of the mechanisms of hooks you understand it intuitively i'll just follow that because that is the strongest training or like approach you can have to hooks is actually genuinely understanding it yourself because yes i can mention all of these best practices to hooks but at the end of the day doesn't really work right so if you've been struggling as of lately i'll just make this one change which is going for proven topics if you have hooks and you understand how to write a good hook that captures attention just use a proven topic and write the same way that you always have been doing right That is genuinely my advice to you.
But if you, on the other hand, don't really know how to write good hooks, you're struggling with it and you don't deep down intuitively understand it, this is the approach I would take. And for me to explain this approach, I actually want to tell a story. So when I was 12 years old, I wanted to become a music producer.
I wanted to be the ones making the beats for all of the biggest rappers and musicians in the world. The issue was... Me at 12 years old, I knew nothing about music theory.
I knew nothing about beats. I knew nothing about instruments. I played the guitar when I was six, but stopped when I was seven.
I knew nothing about the software she used to make all of these beats. I knew nothing about it. I was not equipped to make any good music.
Right. So what did I do? I saw online that you had to download FL Studio.
That was the software you had to use, apparently, to make all of this music. Right. I downloaded that and I quickly figured out.
This is a lot more difficult than I initially thought. So what did I do? Instead of just searching up on YouTube how to make good beats, I looked at live streams.
I searched up the biggest producers I could find that were live streaming and I just ripped off all of their beats. So I looked at how they made their melody and I had it on my TV, right? I was watching the live stream on my TV and I have my laptop right here.
I saw okay he puts his note right there he puts his kick and snare right there and I just said and I did the same thing right I was just copying all of their beats and I was showing it to my friends and family I was essentially just larping all of their beats because I was saying hey look I'm such a prodigy I've been around the block here with music production for two weeks I can already make these beats right so I was just ripping all of the stuff and saying it was mine That was pretty funny looking back now.
But the thing is, I actually learned music production during that. Because the thing is, I saw, okay, these people usually use these instruments together. And they usually use these drums with it.
And they put the kick here and the double snare here and the hi -hats like this. And they make triplets here. And the melodies follow these scales and all of that stuff.
I did like copy everything for 6 to 12 months or something and I just learned all of the patterns and all of a sudden I could take my remote controller and could turn off the television and I could make the beats myself All because I copied my way to understanding the patterns that fundamentally made good beats And it's the same thing with your hooks.
If you don't understand how to make a good hook right now, don't watch a tutorial on how to make a good hook because all they're going to say is, oh, you need attention grabbing things to say and you need these power words, etc. But none of that is going to matter if you don't fundamentally understand the patterns and the psychological patterns behind a good hook.
So what I would do instead is open up Instagram, open up YouTube. And search up your favorite creators, the ones that make the best hooks in your opinion, the ones that you are captivated the most by. And copy them.
But don't just copy them. Study them. So take one hook as a simple example here.
It could be how to, or like the three -step approach to get bigger biceps. That could be a hook, right? On Instagram or something.
You could take that. Study why it works. Okay.
This is very simple straight to the point. It gives a promise etc But let me turn it into something for me the three -step approach to get rid of your visual fat So you don't just blindly copy stuff you try to understand and watch the patterns and you do that subconsciously by Copying by the way if you keep copying hooks and modifying them into your own And you keep getting the reps in that's gonna teach you the patterns of good hook creation So that's the approach I would do.
And again, I want to clarify here. I don't want you to go out there and just copy everything blindly. I want you to go out there and look for hooks that you can modify into your own and actually understand, try to understand why does this work.
That is the hook approach I would take. So one is, if you're already good at it, just keep going. That is genuinely what I would say.
Keep going.
But if you're not good at it, I would copy. Until you understand the patterns and after 6 to 12 months of doing this consistently, you'll understand the patterns. So by taking this approach here, if you're a beginner, two things will happen.
You'll first and foremost actually make better hooks because they're proven to work. So you're finding the viral hooks here and they're proven to work. So your videos won't just flop for a year.
Maybe they will if you have other issues. But they're way more likely to actually work. That's the first thing.
The second thing is you'll understand the patterns if you don't just blindly copy them. But you take an approach where you actually try to learn. So this is the approach I'll take to hooks.
The next thing is body here. So you've mapped out the hook here. The next thing is the body.
The way I like to map out the body is I refer back to the subtopic I found up here. The way that I simplified the idea that I wanted to talk about. And I use something called whisper.
Whisper. I think this is how you spell it without an E. Whisper flow.
Oops. Flow. Right.
It's just a dictation tool. So you can press a button on your keyboard and you can talk and it's going to transcribe that and use it or like paste it into a computer. So the way that I do the body here and map it out is I look at this thing I found here.
The three step approach to losing visual fat. And then I just press my button. And I just talk, talk, talk.
Okay, I want to talk about this and I want to use this example. I want to use this analogy and I want to mention this, this and this. So I intuitively just speak out the script and all of the things that I want to mention throughout the video.
And then at the end here, I look at, okay, do I, so that is like mapping out the body here. And at the end here, I'm mapping out. the ending.
Is it just a conclusion? Is it a follow CTA? Is it a mini chat CTA where I pitch a lead magnet or like what is the ending?
I map that out here. So let's just say that is the CTA or conclusion. Right.
And then what I do is I use AI now. And I know that's like... I don't think it's controversial, but there's a lot of people either hating on AI or absolutely loving it.
But my approach is very simple, because using AI, you can do two things here. AI. You can do two things.
You can either make like a full cloud code system that scrapes the entire internet and uses all of these sophisticated things that I don't even myself understand. That is the wrong approach, in my opinion. The better approach is...
being the actual human, using your actual human creativity behind the video. So you map out the hook, you come up with a good hook, you map out the entire body, and prior to this, you've already mapped out topics that you actually believe in, and subtopics, you've simplified it, right? You map all of that out, the hook, the body, the topic, the subtopic, the ending, and you paste that into ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever you want to use, and you have it connect the dots between it.
You just have it fill in the gaps that you haven't filled in yourself. You just give it a few constraints. Like if it's a Instagram script or Showform script, say max 190 words, for example.
Or if it's a YouTube script, say it's going to be about 2000 to 2700 words, whatever video you're making, right? So you give them these few simple constraints. So it's actually being formatted correctly for your platform.
But then you just have it fill in the blanks. So you give them your topic. and the reason why you've chosen it.
You give them your subtopic and the reason why you've chosen it. You give the hook that you've mapped out, the body you've mapped out, and the ending you've mapped out. And you'll quickly realize that AI is incredibly good at making these scripts when you give them all of this context, where it's actually your human creativity behind.
You're not just sitting down and saying, hey, write the script for me. Write about visual fat now and make sure to make it good. Make sure to have a good hook.
I promise you it's not going to work when you do it that way and that's like probably the biggest mistake I see people using over and over with AI or doing over and over with AI. So this approach right here is the best approach I found to script. It's what I do all the time because what will happen here is it's going to give you like a first draft here and this draft is going to be decent.
It's probably going to be like a 6 to 7 out of 10. And then what you do is you say, oh, there's a little bit of a logical flaw here. Oh, there's something where the flow isn't too good here.
Oh, I don't like the ending here. And you map that out and then you change it. So you change that, you change that and you fix this.
All of a sudden you have a, let's just say eight to nine out of 10 script. And you've increased your workflow. pace of your workflow so much because you've actually used ai to enhance your own creativity this is the approach i would always take um to script so that was the four principles i had for you today it is the four principles i'm using every single day it's the stuff that has generated me hundreds of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers it is the stuff that actually works And hopefully by this video, you could sense that I am on the pursuit of taking this big thing called personal branding and content and breaking it down into simple, actionable steps that you can actually follow to better your personal brand.
So hopefully you want to follow along. That's coming a lot more videos like this in the future. And if you want me and my team to make your content and build your personal brand, click the link in the description and book a call with me.
I'll see you in the next.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The promise is a script upgrade, but the first thing August Carlsson does is tell you that writing is not the bottleneck. Three of his four principles happen before a sentence exists, and the one that matters most is just picking a subject your audience already proved it cares about.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:15list
The four principles of scripting
Topic selection
Simplifying the idea
The theory of structure
The practical scripting approach
The spine of the whole video. Three of the four happen before writing starts, and they are ordered deliberately: each one is useless without the one before it.
Steal forany process teardown where the audience thinks the last step is the hard part
Two ways to find subjects. Original reflects the conscious mind and what people say they want. Proven reflects the subconscious mind and where attention actually goes.
Steal fortopic research for any content calendar
10:31list
Hook, body, ending
Hook: grabs attention
Body: the value and the meat
Ending: the CTA or the conclusion
The three sections every video fundamentally follows, used as the container for the broad-narrow-niche rule.
Steal foroutlining any piece of content before drafting
12:00model
The matchmaking machine
Each upload gets a digital fingerprint built from visuals, audio, captions, and metadata. Each user has an interest fingerprint. Distribution is the platform pairing the two to maximize screen time.
Steal forexplaining recommendation systems to a non-technical audience
13:45model
The test ladder
~100 viewers
~500 viewers
~2000 viewers
escalating until the score turns negative
Videos are released in escalating batches, each scored on watch time and engagement. The batch where the score goes negative is the video's ceiling.
Steal forsetting expectations with clients about why a good video can still cap out
15:55acronym
Broad, narrow, niche (BNN)
Broad hook (broad within the niche)
Narrow body (depth for serious viewers)
Niche ending (calls out the ideal customer)
Maps the three script sections onto the test-batch problem. Broad gets through the first batch, narrow keeps the right people, niche keeps the funnel clean.
Steal forstructuring a short-form script, a landing page, or an email
24:00concept
Copy to pattern
Instead of studying hook tutorials, collect hooks you admire, work out why each one works, and rewrite it for your own subject. Reps build pattern recognition that no list of power words can.
Steal forlearning any craft where the rules are tacit rather than teachable
28:27model
Human-first AI drafting
Topic plus the reason you chose it
Subtopic plus the reason you chose it
Mapped hook
Mapped body
Mapped ending
A platform word count constraint
Hand the model every decision you already made and ask it to connect the dots and fill gaps, rather than asking it to generate the idea.
Steal forany AI drafting workflow where the output keeps coming back generic
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
31:15link
“If you want me and my team to make your content and build your personal brand, click the link in the description and book a call with me.”
Held to the last fifteen seconds and preceded by a positioning line about breaking personal branding into simple actionable steps. Low pressure, but the only ask in a 31-minute video, so it reads as earned rather than inserted.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A fifteen-hour personal-brand course given away free in one unbroken upload, walking a solo creator from blank identity to viral short-form publishing across seven phases: brand, consume, ideas, script, film, edit, and reps.
Two founders sit in a dim French château for 102 unscripted minutes and argue that the thing most people call a personal brand is just content with a face on it.
Thirty-four minutes on an iPad whiteboard arguing that a memorable brand is built from associations, context and a delivery system, not better content.
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