Content Systems for Creators: Why You Need a Content Purpose Statement

Season #11 March 14, 2025

Ever feel like you're spinning your wheels as a creator? You sit down to make your next podcast episode, YouTube video, or book chapter, and instead of clarity, all you feel is overwhelm. You second-guess your ideas, struggle to focus, and worst of all, you wonder if any of this is even worth it.

If you've ever asked yourself, "For what? Why am I even doing this?", you might be missing the one thing that keeps successful creators going: a clear purpose.

When you lack purpose, your content feels scattered, your energy drains into second-guessing, and your audience feels the disconnect. But when you define your Creator Purpose, everything changes. You know what to focus on, what resonates with your audience, and what drives long-term success.

So how do you uncover and connect with your purpose as a creator? In this episode, we'll break it down with a simple, three-part framework to help you get unstuck and start creating with confidence.

What You'll Learn Today:

• Why feeling overwhelmed is often a symptom of missing purpose.
• How defining your Creator Purpose brings clarity, focus, and momentum.
• A three-part exercise to help you craft your own purpose statement.
• How creators like Markiplier used long-term vision to shape their careers.

Because great content starts with clarity—and that clarity starts with purpose.

Write your Creator Purpose Statement and share it! DM me on LinkedIn or Bluesky.

→ Make your AI sound like you, not like everyone else's AI. Free 30-minute setup: shawnbuttner.com/voiceprint
→ Feeling the gap? Book a Creator Diagnostic: shawnbuttner.com/clarity-call

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

This episode is about content systems and building your creator system around a clear purpose.

Episode Transcript

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Shawn Buttner: You're not stuck, you just don't have a clear purpose. If you don't have a clear purpose, you feel overwhelmed. You don't know what to work on, what stuff's effective, why you're even doing things. You spend a ton of energy on why is this important. So if you've ever sat down [Mic bleed] your computer, Ready to create your next podcast episode, your next YouTube episode, your next chapter of your book, and you thought to yourself, I've done all this work for what, [Mic bleed] for what question is a huge indicator that we're not connected [Mic bleed] or if you can't articulate your audience, the reason people should listen, or you have trouble focusing on an idea for a particular piece of content.

Again, it's because you don't have a clear [Mic bleed] when you're overwhelmed and,

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Shawn Buttner: when [00:01:00] you're overwhelmed, exhausted, and inarticulate, your content sucks,

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Shawn Buttner: scatterbrained, it might jump from,

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Shawn Buttner: topic to topic, there's no consistency throughout your body of work, and this is stuff that I've experienced myself,

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Shawn Buttner: Your content's a mess. You experience existential dread every so often of did I screw up? Quitting my giant, really well paying corporate job to do this, to help

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Shawn Buttner: take a chance on this creative career. And you start to doubt that the effort you put into the work equals progress.

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Shawn Buttner: what if you could feel confident?

Day to day in your creative career, if you

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Shawn Buttner: spend your energy on doing instead of trying to figure out why you're doing

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Shawn Buttner: you could speak directly to your audience, why your topic's important, and you can added it down to one major idea per

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Shawn Buttner: In today's episode, we're going to talk about how creators find their purpose.

A few examples, to illustrate it and a simple three part exercise to help. You connect more

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Shawn Buttner: your

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Shawn Buttner: Welcome to creators that crush the show that helps you move from crushed to crushing it as a creator. I'm your coach and host, Sean. I'm a certified high performance coach, exploring how to use high performance principles

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Shawn Buttner: the content creator context.

earlier this week I was in a group where we were talking about what is success actually, right? And then we started to talk about what success versus vision is. And what's interesting is as we're talking about it, success turned out to be more of a measurement.

Shawn Buttner: So I am successful when I have the big house on the hill, the private jet,

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Shawn Buttner: X amount of dollars in the bank. It could be I've achieved. A [00:03:00] family level of this many Children with this type of spouse,

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Shawn Buttner: there's so many different ways we can find success. But it became clear that every time we defined

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Shawn Buttner: it was a measurement,

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Shawn Buttner: And we started talking about vision and how it's this ideal future that we've realized. And there's a difference between having vision for an ideal future and the measures that,

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Shawn Buttner: Make sure or tell you're reaching that

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Shawn Buttner: and thinking on it more this week, I realized that bridge is purpose and most creators mistake success for vision and purpose, like just because you have 100 million views on YouTube doesn't necessarily mean you are successful, especially if you're trying to run a business and You're not getting any clients, and you have that big of an audience, right?

That's not really success. [00:04:00] Or, you have that platform, and you're

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Shawn Buttner: leading and changing how people think and feel and exist

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Shawn Buttner: the world.most creators don't have a clear vision for why they're doing what

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Shawn Buttner: That's why you feel the overwhelm. That's why you feel exhausted. That's why you feel wary about what the job is.

And eventually, if you don't have a clear vision for where you're going and where you're leading your audience, you quit. And most creators then are not connected to their brand purpose,

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Shawn Buttner: you don't have a clear vision, and you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, which is your purpose, you can't bridge The long term vision with short term success.

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Shawn Buttner: this is illustrated in a client that I had years ago who was, really proud of,

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Shawn Buttner: this next week I want to do workout five days a week and he's able to accomplish that. [00:05:00] He's really stoked. He's able to do that.

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Shawn Buttner: we got into exploring why he was excited about that. It's We found out that what he was really after was living a healthier life.

And when we figured that out, Oh, I want to live a healthier life. I'm like, why is that important to you? It's I have small children and I want to make sure that I'm around for them when they get older. I'm like, okay, so that's your why. How does it feel now having to do your workouts this coming

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Shawn Buttner: he's

Shawn Buttner: instead of having it to be something that I check off in my life, this is something. That matters deeply to me and my family, right? This is something I must do. There's necessity behind completing these workouts now, and it changed how he approached doing that moving forward. So that's the power of connecting your purpose with the things that you're doing or your measures of success where the success was.

Did I do the workout?

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Shawn Buttner: The purpose and long term vision is I want to be around for my kids long term vision. And

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Shawn Buttner: necessity is,

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Shawn Buttner: purpose I need to do this in the short term to realize the long term goal.

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Shawn Buttner: how can creators connect more with

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Shawn Buttner: create a purpose statement.

And with a strong purpose statement that it could be something as formal as we're going to discuss later in this episode. Or it could be something that is just the strong intention or the strong goal.

Shawn Buttner: vision you have for yourself that can completely change how you approach

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Shawn Buttner: An example of this in the real world is the YouTuber

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Shawn Buttner: started out doing video game videos, which is

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Shawn Buttner: mouthful to say,

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Shawn Buttner: hanging out with his friends and doing that whole thing on YouTube, but [00:07:00] he knew when he started out that he eventually wanted to make.

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Shawn Buttner: high production value movies. And so while he was learning how to just edit and do the basics

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Shawn Buttner: video production through his YouTube channel, with his friends goofing off, he also was learning how to direct and how to

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Shawn Buttner: of production to where he was now able to innovate on YouTube.

With a series called A Heist with Markiplier, where it's basically a choose your own adventure through YouTube, but it's all like a high end movie, which it's really fantastic. Definitely go check that out.

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Shawn Buttner: purpose, and that vision of, I want to

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Shawn Buttner: movies,

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Shawn Buttner: quality movies. Starting where he could start, and making progress towards that, so the success markers.

Offer the purpose

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Shawn Buttner: [00:08:00] doing something innovative and cool is exactly why you want to have purpose and you want to connect with purpose as a

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Shawn Buttner: how do we do that?

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Shawn Buttner: in high performance coaching, we talk about a three part creator purpose statement for a purpose statement for your creator.

Purpose statement should be. The reason why you're creating or the purpose for your content,

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Shawn Buttner: You could break it down into three parts. First, my content aspires to be,

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Shawn Buttner: to be statement. Two, my content helps people do dot. And then three, so that. So the reason why it's necessary

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Shawn Buttner: be and to

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Shawn Buttner: And take a moment to think through this yourself, and if you're watching or listening at home, pause this and for five minutes, journal on these three questions. My content aspires to be, my [00:09:00] content helps people do, so

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Shawn Buttner: for Creators that Crush, I want, my content aspires to be thoughtful, impactful, and a force of good. My content aspires to help do. Or create content that inspires the best in others and is the highest quality information

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Shawn Buttner: So that we can trust information again, we can express ourselves fully, and we can,

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Shawn Buttner: leave the world better piece by piece.

Make the world better piece.

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Shawn Buttner: combined,

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Shawn Buttner: purpose statement that I created right before this episode.

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Shawn Buttner: creators that crush aspire to be thoughtful, impactful, and good to create high quality, inspiring content so they can fully express themselves and improve the world

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Shawn Buttner: just saying that is pretty great.

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Shawn Buttner: paints

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Shawn Buttner: picture on why I hope you're listening to this

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Shawn Buttner: And, I know that I'll workshop this as I go along, so this is not the final thing.

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Shawn Buttner: there's other parts to this,

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Shawn Buttner: that I've done with other work.

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Shawn Buttner: at the end of the day, I hope this is thoughtful.

I hope this helps you crush it as a creator. And I hope

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Shawn Buttner: ripples out into goodness out in the world.

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Shawn Buttner: I find this really exciting

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Shawn Buttner: inspiring. How would you use your purpose

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Shawn Buttner: one, read it out loud yourself every day. two, when in doubt, consult your purpose statement. So if you're confused about what to do, what topic to do, filter it through this content creator purpose statement.

three, write it out. Post it by wherever you work. So you see it every day before,

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Shawn Buttner: again, when you don't know what to do or to talk about, consult it, and then. If you don't know if you're doing a good job or not, this is also a great measure to see, is [00:11:00] it leading to

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Shawn Buttner: purpose?

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Shawn Buttner: my challenge to you this week, spend 15 minutes to create your creator purpose

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Shawn Buttner: and then spend a minute every day connecting with

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Shawn Buttner: see how that feels.

I know from working with tons and

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Shawn Buttner: clients as a coach, that

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Shawn Buttner: really changes how you show up for yourself,

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Shawn Buttner: your work, for the people around you that rely on

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Shawn Buttner: a very powerful thing that

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Shawn Buttner: super impactful. It could change your life.

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Shawn Buttner: as you do this, I would encourage you, if you want to share it with me, you can hit me up on LinkedIn or Blue Sky or you can direct message me on those platforms.

I'll link that below

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Shawn Buttner: share your statement. With me or post it on my page with the hashtag or with the tag creators that

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Shawn Buttner: I think by [00:12:00] going through this and just being a little bit more connected, you'll be able to resist or find your way through the overwhelm

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Shawn Buttner: better.

You'll be able to immediately answer. I'm doing all this work. What's it for? And it's for my purpose. And that makes all the difference.

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Shawn Buttner: will feel different. yeah, let me know what you guys think. And if you loved this episode, you'll like the episode from two weeks ago when I talk about values, metrics,

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Shawn Buttner: related to this, but it's a separate thing.

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Shawn Buttner: that,

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Shawn Buttner: I'll leave that for you guys to explore. Thank you for listening to Creators That Crush. Again, I'm your host, Sean Butler, and we'll see you guys next week. Take care.