Action-Map Your Curriculum

You’re currently 13 lessons deep in a course built entirely on this discipline. Every lesson header in this track is a verb: Validate, Define, Write, Design, Record, Choose, Run, Build, Ship. None of them are nouns like “Platforms” or “Pricing Theory.” That’s not a style choice, it’s the whole method. Now point it at your own topic, where it’s genuinely harder, because you know the subject so well that “everything feels important” and cutting a topic you personally find fascinating will feel like a loss even when the learner doesn’t need it to perform the target behavior.

Brain-dump first, knife second. List every task, in order, that someone doing your topic well would actually perform, start to finish. Don’t self-edit on the first pass, get the real sequence down.

Then run every item through one question: “If I cut this, does the learner fail at the Lesson 2 end-state behavior?” If the honest answer is no, it’s a topic, not an action, and it comes out. This is where expert knowledge over-produces: you’ll want to include background, history, theory, “context that helps it click.” None of that survives the knife unless the learner literally cannot perform the target action without it.

Rewrite every survivor as an action-first sentence with a named artifact: not “pricing strategy” but “set a price backed by a written justification.” If you can’t finish the sentence “here is the thing they produce to prove it,” it’s still a topic wearing a verb.

Check the whole chain against Lesson 2 once you’re done: read it top to bottom and confirm it visibly builds to the exact ending behavior you wrote. If it doesn’t land there, something’s missing or something extra is padding the walk.