This is the best scriptwriting advice I learned all year

This week, a client taught me one of the most powerful techniques I've ever come across for radically improving your next video before you publish it.

Next time you sit down to review a finished script, do this 👇

Here's the problem:

Every month, my client and I would sit down to analyse our retention.

And these retention graph reviews? They were brutal.

Not "brutal" because the graphs were terrible.

But "brutal" because we seemed much more willing to call out bad stuff when doing the post-publish review.

Now, sure, hindsight is 20/20, and there are always great lessons to learn from reviewing content once it goes live.

But we noticed something important.

The way our brains operated during a retention graph review after publishing always felt different from when we were doing the final script review before publishing.

It was like, all of a sudden, we were allowing ourselves to be way more brutal with our feedback:

• "Retention dipped at 6mins? Well duh, we totally gave the payoff too early."
• "Dang, no wonder people got bored here... I kinda got bored listening back to it."
• "I knew we should have cut this bit, not sure why I didn't mention it earlier."

So... my client had an idea:

What if we changed our mindset on the final review (i.e. final pass at the script, or final pass giving notes to the editor).

What if, instead of treating this like a video we were about to publish...

...we instead treated it like a retention graph review for a video we already published?

Crucially... we would imagine that the video totally flopped.

Mindset Shift

I cannot overstate how much that mindset shift changed things.

Having already reviewed our upcoming video multiple times, given feedback to the editor, and having thought the video was pretty tight...

...I suddenly found 2+ minutes of footage I wanted to cut.

It was like I'd unlocked a new part of my brain 🧠

It turned out I'd not been entirely honest with myself in my previous feedback sessions.

But I'd been liberated by this new way of thinking.

So, when taking a final pass at your next video (at either the scripting or editing stage)...

...imagine you're reviewing the video after you published it... and it totally flopped!

(And notice yourself become a little more brutal with your feedback 😉)

Huge shoutout to Andra from Efficient App (my wonderful client!) for this awesome mindset shift! 🙏

That's all for this week.

After a busy month, I've decided to go totally offline for the next 10 days (first time in over a year!)

So... no newsletters for the next 2 weeks!

Appreciate your patience, grateful for your support... and wishing you all the best for now ☕️

Speak soon,
George 👋