The value of repetition
Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, has
an interesting insight about repetition:
Of course you're listening. You're the one that's sharing such
valuable insight with the universe. You're busy talking about your
product or your new book or your organization. You walk into a meeting
and there are four impatient people sitting around the table, urging
you on, faster faster faster don't waste our time.
So you assume that they're getting it the first time.
They're not.
Odds are, your very clear, very useful ideas are getting garbled in
translation. I'll do a post on a topic, and people will trackback to
it, announcing that I've said something quite different. I double check
my riff to be sure I said what I meant to say, and yes, I did. But they
didn't hear me.
It's so tempting to compress your ideas into the smallest possible
space and assume that the text or the images or the design will carry
the day. But we know that repetition is essential.
The paradox is that the long stuff gets skipped. The long stuff gets
ignored. Short books sell better, short commercials get more viewers.
So repetition becomes essential. It'll bore your biggest fans, but you
can do that (a little).
Sticking to (and building on) your story works if you do it over time.
I've always felt that repetition helped me learn.
We're often accused, as software developers, of writing solutions to the same problem over and over. I don't see this as repetition, but
practicing the fundamentals:
The problem the Parelli's see in those trying to transition from
skilled amateur to expert virtually always comes down to something from
the fundamentals that they either never quite mastered, or that they
forgot over time. So, perhaps that's one more thing the superior
performers do better than the rest of us--they keep practicing the fundamentals. This fits with the notion that experts practice things that aren't necessarily fun, which can include both the things they still don't do well, AND the non-exciting basics.
Bert Bates (my co-author) is a blackbelt level go player, one of the
best amateur players in the state. But when a visiting expert--four
belt levels above Bert--showed up at the local go tournament, Bert was
surprised to see the guy reading a book on fundamental go problems that
Bert had read much earlier in his learning. The expert said, "I must
have read this at least a hundred times. My goal each time is to see
how much more quickly I can solve all the problems in the book than I
did the last time."