You've had this moment. You're in the shower, in the car, mid-conversation with your family, and an idea hits so hard you know there's no way you'll forget it.

Twenty minutes later, it's gone. For the life of you, you can't get it back.

Now multiply that by every week you've been creating. That's not a creativity problem. That's a capture problem. And it's the reason most creators say the most common thing creators say: "I'm running out of ideas."

You're not. You never were. You're just not catching them.

What if I'd taken it serious back then?

I've been full-time for 12 years. And I'll be honest: I've fumbled more big moments than most creators will ever get. Not because the ideas weren't there. Because I didn't write them down.

Back in my Twitch days, one of my favorite moves was making skits whenever Twitch did something dumb or controversial. One of those skits pulled millions of views on X. I funneled people to a long-form YouTube video that same day, and it did 200,000 views overnight.

Then I thought, cool, they're watching me now. They'll just keep watching.

They didn't. Because I had no plan for the next day. No list. No ideas written down. So I started making random stuff. Chasing trends. Watching what MrBeast was doing. None of it connected to what made that moment work, and the momentum died.

Twitch would spike me, pay me well for a stretch, and leave me with some leftover viewers. But you can't live inside one ecosystem. I had no vault to pour that attention into, so I squandered it. Over and over.

I think about that a lot. What would those years have looked like if I'd organized everything while I was growing?

The fear nobody talks about

In 2019 I left Twitch for YouTube and leaned into Apex Legends. I was super late to the game. In six months, I took that channel from zero to about $2,500 a month, off one well-placed stream a week and a few uploads.

But here's what almost got me. After the first couple of videos worked, a fear kicked in: okay, it worked. Now what?

That's where most creators break. I ask people on my strategy calls all the time: if I gave you a million subscribers tomorrow, could you keep them? Could you keep coming up with ideas? Could you keep showing up?

Most can't. Not because they're not talented. Because they're running the whole operation out of their head.

I hit the same wall in tech. One review does well, great. But I don't have the bankroll to buy every laptop and camera. How do I keep going? The answer was sitting in front of me: I'd been having ideas the whole time. I just wasn't keeping them.

So I started carrying field notes everywhere. If I read a comment that sparked something, I wrote it down. If I was out in public thinking about how a video did, I wrote it down. I stopped letting ideas live in my head.

Ideas are 70% of the battle

Everyone obsesses over execution. The camera, the edit, the hook. But execution is the physical part. You sit down, you hit record, you build it.

The idea is the other 70%. Coming up with something worth making, a conversation worth starting, something that entertains people or adds to their day. That part happens in the dark, long before you hit record. And it's the part nobody builds a system for.

The prolific people all have one. Lil Wayne and Eminem are famous for sitting on vaults of unreleased songs, most of which nobody will ever hear. They pull from them later. MrBeast has thousands of video ideas banked. The Gary Vees and Hormozis of the world turn one conversation into ten pieces of content.

Prolific isn't a personality trait. It's infrastructure.

Last year, I had to rebuild it all

A year ago, my YouTube uploads were lucky to hit 1,000 views. My vertical content was barely breaking a couple hundred thousand views, because I'd put everything back into streaming.

So I used Battlefield as a test. I gave myself 90 days and asked: if I were coaching someone, what would I actually have them do to grow, without chasing vanity metrics? That system became my Breakout Blueprints.

Part of it was ideas. As the Battlefield videos picked up, I was getting more ideas than paper could hold. I started screenshotting comments into a Google Drive folder. Then I thought, why is this a folder of screenshots? I already run my finances and yearly plans in spreadsheets. So it became a grid. Then I realized I could filter it.

That changed everything. It built confidence, because I could see I'd never actually run out. And it showed me how one idea branches into five.

It's not just me

I see the same problem on every strategy call.

One creator had a breakthrough selling a fitness product. He was killing it, and he was burnt out. He thought maybe he wasn't meant for fitness. We dug in, and the real problem was simpler: he was repeating the one thing that worked, over and over. He couldn't see the hundred ideas branching off it, same niche, same arena, just different angles.

I also managed channels for clients over the last couple of years. One was one of the biggest Warzone streamers. We revived his main channel and took his second channel from about $50 a month to $1,500 a month in two months.

We did that in February. Peak Warzone 2, when everyone was complaining numbers were down across the board. The creators running on memory died that month. We had a system and a bank of ideas to pull from.

We diversify our money. Why not our content?

Creators finally get it on the money side. You can't just monetize on Twitch. You need brand deals, YouTube revenue, affiliates, your own products, even selling off old gear so it's not just sitting there losing value. Fifty bucks here, twenty bucks there. In a space this volatile, it adds up fast.

One month earlier this year, YouTube ad revenue paid me a few hundred dollars. Memberships, a couple hundred more. If that's all I counted, it was a bad month. But that same channel drove a brand deal north of $3,000, merch sales, affiliate sales, and sales on my website. All in, that one channel was worth $7,200 that month.

Without the boring stuff, I'd have left about $6,800 on the table. Not because of bad luck. Because of negligence. Because of waiting.

Here's another one. Someone made fun of me for getting 6 million views on Facebook in a month and "only" making $240. I didn't even post there. It auto-posted from Instagram. That $240 covers the insurance on my truck and my wife's car. For free.

So we stack income streams. But for some reason, we don't do the same thing with the thing that drives the income. The content.

It's like training hard and ignoring what you eat. I'm cutting right now, so I walk whenever I can to burn calories, and I eat less. It's boring. The boring stuff is literally what gets the results.

Content works the same way. Short-form ideas, long-form ideas, stream moments, posts, emails, even blogs. Most creators are eating one slice and calling it a meal.

Consistency is the whole game

Regardless of what anyone tells you, consistency is everything in this space. You have to show up on the days that suck. The days you're dealing with your own problems. The days nothing new is out and nothing big is happening.

Those are exactly the days your brain gives you nothing. That's why you can't run on memory. You need a list to pull from.

And when something big does break, the list lets you pivot without losing anything. This week is a perfect example. I had a full week of content planned. Then the AT&T and iPhone situation hit. I swapped my plans, jumped on the breaking story, and those videos are some of my best-performing verticals in weeks. The content I'd planned didn't die. It went back in the bank, and it'll be better when I use it.

So I stopped trusting my memory

That's the whole trick. Every idea, the second it hits, goes in one place I control. Not my head. Not five different apps.

I've been doing this for years with field notes, folders, and spreadsheets. So I finally packaged the whole system into one.

The Big E Content Planner is how I run my content now. An Idea Bank for every idea, tagged by content type and platform. A weekly calendar where ideas get a day and actually get made. Stats that show what you really posted. And your editor or manager can plan with you.

The platform filters aren't there so you post everywhere. You don't have to. They're there to spark the thought: I could make an X post out of that. So you note it. Then the X post does well, and you think, this could be a YouTube video. One idea turns into four. That's how you solve "what do I post" for good.

Not ready for the full system? Start with the free Idea Bank. It's just the capture part, synced on your phone and computer. When you're ready for the planner, your ideas carry straight over.

You're not out of ideas. Start catching them.