Just The Tip

Hey, if you missed my other blog post about headlines, you won't appreciate the headline of this blog post. If you did, awesome.

Today I am all about sharing one of my favorite tools for transcribing my spoken word into written word. In fact, if you're watching the video below, you are seeing it in action as I speak it.

Tap The iPhone Video To Watch

If you have a smartphone and the ability to speak, you have the ability to easily transcribe your spoken words as you speak them. It's called your notes app. This app is different in the iPhone and Android world, of course, but both allow you to do cool things like this. In fact, 90% of ALL of my content, ad ideas, and important notes are "written" this way.

Why Talking Beats Typing

Here's the thing nobody tells you about typing: it kills your voice. The second your fingers hit a keyboard, you start "writing." You get formal. You get careful. You start editing yourself before the thought even finishes forming. That's the opposite of what good copy, good headlines, good anything sounds like.

When you talk, you don't do that. You just say the thing. Your real voice — the one that actually sounds like you, the one your audience trusts because it doesn't sound like a corporate memo — comes out when you speak, not when you type. I've been doing this 40 years and written well over 100,000 ads, and the stuff that performs best has never been the polished stuff. It's the stuff that sounds like a human said it. Talking to your phone is the fastest way to get that.

How I Actually Use It

It's not complicated. I open the notes app, I hit the mic button, and I just talk like I'm explaining something to a friend. No script. No outline. No "let me think about how to phrase this." I just say what I'd say if you asked me the question out loud.

A few things that make it work better:

Talk like you're texting a friend a long story, not like you're giving a speech. The second you start "presenting," you lose the natural rhythm.

Don't stop to fix mistakes. Keep going. You can clean up typos and stray words after — that takes thirty seconds. Stopping mid-thought to fix a word kills your momentum and you lose the next idea.

Say it out loud once through, then read it back. Half the time you don't even need to edit it. The other half, you're just trimming, not rewriting. It's the same discipline I use writing headlines — I'll riff out ten versions out loud before I ever commit one to the page, because a headline that just sits there looking pretty never earned anybody's attention.

Keep your phone on you. The best ideas don't show up when you're sitting at a desk ready to write. They show up in the car, on a walk, in the shower thinking about something else entirely. Your notes app doesn't care where you are.

This entire post was created in under five minutes simply by speaking my thoughts and letting the phone do all of the work. I use the same method for client work — even the AI tools in my workflow start with me talking through the strategy out loud before anything gets typed. Try it sometime… you'll thank me… and you'll wonder why you didn't start doing this sooner.