Repeatable

It’s tough to be remarkable. It’s even tougher to be repeatable.

There’s not much personal incentive to repeat what someone else has already said or done. After all, you can’t take credit for the idea, just association. You’re merely a conduit spreading the idea.

But that conduit serves an important role: filtering. Because things that are said only once aren’t important at all. But things that get repeated are important. They demand attention.

They demand attention because the friction that keeps ideas from being repeated means ideas that push past that friction, past that filter, are worthy of consideration. They’re the strong ones, the ones that survive.

Here are a few I’ve run into lately, repeatedly:

• “People don’t like the church and people don’t trust advertising. Why use a mechanism people don’t trust to promote something they don’t care about?” –Tim Schraeder
• “If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.” -Charles F. Kettering (via Chris Guillebeau and Dru Longhofer)
• “Are you a Christian? Yes? Then you are called to three things. Love God, love people, and go into all the world and preach the gospel.” –Rocky Jones (via Joey Colón)
• “People don’t buy what you do. They buy what you believe.” –Simon Sinek

What are you repeating?