Repeat versus fresh content

When deciding what content to dig into (books, podcasts, etc), I’m often faced with an interesting decision: do I want to explore something new, or revisit an old favorite?

Over the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of revisiting in place of new content. I’m still reading a few new books every month, but I’m also working on revisiting old content to help better understand it and solidify it in my brain. My new “Stacking Knowledge” podcast is a great example of that.

I thought more about this today while listening to a new(?) episode of Seth Godin’s “ Akimbo “ podcast. I wasn’t sure about the word “new” in that sentence, because while it was a fresh podcast in his feed, it began with “this is a special archived episode of Akimbo”, as many of his often do. It’s a rerun.

My initial thought was disappointment. I love Seth’s insights on various topics, and was sad to not have a new one to enjoy. However, this particular episode was a few years old and I had forgotten pretty much everything about it. To me, it was new! While parts of it were familiar, I still picked up quite a bit of info from it even though I had heard it before.

Generally speaking, if I’m consuming content I prefer for it to be new, but I’m slowly changing on that. My strategy for the past few years has been to consume quite a lot of new content, but also to…