The power of repetition

Repetition is not always the same thing as redundancy. 

Preparing for the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech writers counseled him to not sound too much like a preacher. They said people would be put off by the repetition. 

About halfway through, he ditched the pre-written speech and spoke off the cuff, repeating the phrase “I have a dream” 8 times. 

I wonder what that day would have looked like to us today, if MLK listened to his speechwriters.

Adam Grant reminds us of how repetition operates in songs: “You don’t know the chorus by heart until you’ve repeated it many times.”

The leaders I work with all believe that “I said it once, that should be enough,” and then complain about being criticized for under-communicating.