If you have no idea what you stand for, start from this
Known for - Known against and what it means for you
What I’m Seeing
The most common thing I hear from professionals who start posting online is not “I don’t know how to write” or “I don’t have time.” It is: “I don’t know what to talk about.”
They have 10, 15, 20 years of experience.
They could talk for hours over dinner about what they do.
But the moment they open LinkedIn to write a post, everything goes blank.
The problem is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of direction.
They have not decided what they want to be known for.
So every post feels like starting from zero because it is.
I had this exact problem when I left Warner Bros.
YouTube strategy was always the core of what I did.
But I kept going back and forth: should I talk about how to build a career and get into top companies?
Should I go niche into YouTube analytics, or animation production, or copyright management?
All things I knew well. All things I could teach.
But when I tried to signal all of them, nobody remembered any of them. I was a specialist with five different specialisms, which is the worst position to be in online, because the internet does not reward range. It rewards clarity.
The shift happened when I stopped asking “what can I talk about?” and started asking “what do I want to be known for?”
Different question. Completely different outcome.
One Framework: The Known-For List
This is the simplest exercise I know for solving the “what do I post about” problem.
Write down four things:
2 things you want to be KNOWN FOR: the associations you are building toward.
2 things you want to be KNOWN AGAINST: what you explicitly refuse to be or do.
That is it. Four items.
The “known for” part is usually manageable.
Most people can name what they want to be associated with, even if it takes some thinking.
The “known against” part is where it gets uncomfortable.
Because it requires you to exclude.
To say: I am not that, and I do not want to attract people who think I am.
Think about Alex Hormozi.
You know what he stands for within 30 seconds, but you also know instantly what he refuses to be.
No lifestyle content.
No vague motivation.
No advice without a number behind it.
That “known against” is what makes his positioning sharp. Without it, he is just another business creator.
Here are mine:
Known for:
1) Warner Bros-level platform expertise applied to individual creators and professionals
2) Earned freedom through intelligence and persistence, not inherited advantages
Known against:
1) Guru mythology and get-rich-quick narratives that promise transformation without work
2) Doom without direction: analysing what is broken without offering a way forward
Every piece of content I make, every post I write, every newsletter I send - I check it against these four.
Does this reinforce what I want to be known for?
Does it accidentally associate me with something I want to be known against?
If you do this exercise and then look at your last ten posts, you will probably notice that half of them do not connect to any of the four.
That is not a content quality problem.
That is a clarity problem.
Once the four are clear, content ideas stop being a blank page.
They become a filter.
The ideas were always there, you just did not know which ones to use.
The Build Update
I spent some time building this inside Showrunner.one: specifically, what questions should someone answer first when they are building a professional presence from scratch.
If you want to take this further, two options.
If you are already using AI for content, add your Known-For List to your prompts, it becomes a filter that keeps everything you generate on-brand.
Or if you want the full guided version, showrunner.one walks you through this and other questions in sequence, starting with what the tool calls the Brand Blueprint.
One Thing to Try This Week
Open a blank doc. Write your Known-For List. Two FOR, two AGAINST.
Then look at your last five posts or your LinkedIn profile.
How many of those four things are visible to a stranger?
If the answer is zero, that is why posting feels directionless.
The ideas are not the problem. The filter is missing.
Reply with your four if you want a second pair of eyes.
I will tell you honestly whether they are clear enough.
Francesco