Part 2: What Greek philosophy teaches us about making good content

Rachel here! Welcome back to What's Good? (In Content),a six-part Superpath series! In it, as the name suggests, I'll be exploring what it means to make content good, the quality vs. quantity debate, and (hopefully) trying to think broadly and deeply about what makes for good content, and why (or if?) it even matters. If you have questions, responses, comments, or hot takes in response, send them my way!

P.S. I took inspiration for the name for this series from an old coworker who used to say, “Hey, what’s good?” every morning when I got to the office. Shoutout to Taylor: “What’s good?” “Life’s good, I guess.”

What's Good? (In Content) is one of three rotating Thursday series. You can manage which ones you get here.

Last time on What's Good? (In Content), I argued that good content does more than just follow the rules. But I left aside many questions for later, namely:

For the moment, I'm going to leave aside questions like what does good look like in different content with different purposes? and who gets to decide what's good? and how good does it need to be? and good compared to what? and so on, and simply say for now: good content fulfills its aim.

Well, it's later.

And there's one question in particular that I want to tease out, which is:

What does it mean for content to be good, when "content" has such broad purposes and aims?

And to explore a possible answer, I'm going to bring us back in time, way back, to around 360 BC, and into the living room of an ancient Greek philosopher: Plato.

(Stick with me, here, I promise I'm getting somewhere good.)

In Plato's philosophy of the world, every concept has a "Form" that is the highest, truest ideal of that concept. That is: the justice when someone steals your cookie and then immediately drops it reflects the "form" of capital-J Justice; the love that you feel when you snuggle with your puppy reflects the "form" of capital-L Love, and so on.

For Plato, "the Good" is the highest and most fundamental of the Forms, it's the Form that everything else is imitating. The Form of Justice imitates the Good. The Form of Love imitates the Good. When someone or something is good, it's because it imitates some ultimate ideal of "Goodness" aka the Form of the Good.

Whether or not you buy that, there's a really important takeaway for how we think about content.

Because for Plato, the way that anything achieves goodness is through excellence. And excellence is not necessarily about quality, or following a set of rules, or matching some pattern of "excellence" we have in our world to look to, it happens when something (or someone) fulfills its aim, or function, or purpose for which it was created.

…when what? When it fulfills its aim, or function, or purpose for which it was created. This is a teleological argument (it explains things by their "ends" or goals, rather than their causes), and I think it's a good way to think about content.

For one, because "content" is about the broadest umbrella you can find. "Content" can mean a novel, a business book, a marketing blog post, a LinkedIn post about your dog, an email newsletter on Substack, a TV ad, a TikTok… clearly, all of those things aren't "good" in the same way or for the same reasons.

But also because, the way that we find out how to make something good, whatever it is, is not by starting with the cause. The cause of much marketing content is often something like:

And Plato (and I) would argue: those causes cannot tell you what good looks like for that content, or how to get there.

Instead, you can figure out what good looks like for your content, for this particular piece of content, by asking four questions:

In order for your content to be good, it first needs to have some end. That is: it needs to be created for some purpose or function. Not a reason, mind you, but a goal.

A reason is something like "We need to do a launch campaign."
A goal is something like, "We want this to excite and unify our users around a product" or "We want our readers to feel so understood and inspired from this that they share it with a coworker."

And yes, big-picture content goals can help you see if it's successful, and measure ROI, and blah blah blah. But what I'm trying to point out really is:

If the reason for your content is just for it to exist — and it doesn't really have a goal at all, it just needs to be there — then it doesn't have to be good.

In fact, it can't be good, it can only be mediocre, because, as Plato might say, there is no Form for it to imitate, no end for it to fulfill. (I also wonder why you would set the goal of your content as basically :null but that's another question for another time.)

Why does this particular piece of content need to exist?
What is the end, function, purpose, etc. that it needs to serve?
What do you want this content to do, for you AND for your audience?

This is a much harder question, which is why we often just… don't answer it.

Ronnie Higgins would call this your content's "job to be done." It could be as simple as saying "This is why we're creating this and this is what we want it to achieve." Even the TOFU / MOFU / BOFU framework can be a (somewhat convoluted) way of looking at ends.

But I think understanding that "goodness" can only be talked about in relation to an end brings out another point that we need to talk about more:

At least in the case of marketing content, "quality" is not correlative with goodness.

Which brings us to question 3:

Essentially: goodness depends on your goal.

"Quality" content, I'm sorry to say, means nothing if your content doesn't fulfill its aim. Content can be absolutely perfect in one context and trash in another. That's what makes "good" content so tricky to identify from the outside.

Is that LinkedIn post good?
Is that blog post good?
Is this email good?
Was that viral marketing campaign good?

I don't know, depends on the aim.

If the aim of the email is to get a lot of subscribers, it should look very different from an email that's meant to make a sale, or an email that's meant to resonate with a select audience, or an email that's meant to have people take action on some outstanding action item.

More importantly, what does an email in your context, to your audience, for this particular goal need to look like to fulfill that goal?

Finally, you can ask:

Importantly, the "Form" is not a template to follow. Remember what Plato said, kids: it's an ideal to strive for.

This can come from lots of places: a swipe file, a successful campaign you pulled off in the past, a landing page that's already working.

You don't (shouldn't) copy-paste and assume that template will work perfectly in another context; no two content contexts are exactly the same. Just like (as Plato would say), no two instances of love or justice or virtue are the same; and yet they all imitate "the Ideal" or "the Good."

We spend so much time debating about "quality" and "good" content (as if all content could have a single metric for "goodness") and if AI can make something "good" and, and, and…

I think we can give a lot of those questions a rest by simply asking:

If you can answer all of those questions, then you march onwards confidently: you already know what is required for your content to be "good."

- Rachel