I need to repeat myself

I’ve shared a few times on here my desire to repeat myself more often, so I guess this post is kind of a self-fulfilling success!

This really comes from a few different angles. As Robert Carnes shared in his book “The Story Cycle”, repetition is essential in marketing because your audience only hears what you have to say a fraction of the time. He says:

Remember that once you’ve heard the story internally a few dozen times, it likely means that your audience has only heard it once or twice. Keep sharing.

The other side is repetition for yourself. While I’m not great about repeating my words on here very often, I often repeat things that I want to learn through three main activities:

1. Using Anki flashcards. Any quote or concept that I want to remember goes in there, and I see it repeated quite often.
2. Using Readwise frequently. I’m not always as good about this, but I try to run Readwise “Daily Reviews” as often as I can, to see the same great quotes repeatedly.
3. By forcing myself to revisit books, via our virtual book club (come join us) and by chatting with people on my podcast. These cause me to read some new books, which is great, but more often I’m opening up books I’ve read in the past and further cementing some of the lessons that I learned from them.

This whole post initially came up from a quote I read in “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, where the author is describing how Charlie thinks about this:

A special note: Charlie’s redundancy in expressions and examples is purposeful; for the kind of deep “fluency” he advocates, he knows that repetition is the heart of instruction.

In that book alone, which largely covers various talks that Charlie gave over the years, you can hear repetition in many of the talks. He shares some of the same anecdotes multiple times, because he’s found that they’re helpful and there’s no reason to try to come up with new examples when the old ones work perfectly well.

It’s a fine line between “always be exploring and learning” and “revisit and repeat past learnings to go deeper”, and it’s a line I’ll continue to try to balance for the rest of my life.