Play It Again

Seth Godin’s post from this morning is all the more appropriate in light of Nokia’s new N1 tablet:

John Koenig calls it vemödalen. The fear that you’re doing something that’s already been done before, that everything that can be done has been done.

Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.

A better question to ask is, “have you ever done this before?” Or perhaps, “are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?”
Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—they all imitated, and in some cases stole from folk and blues musicians, but at the end of the day, their music ended up being bigger than the sum of the parts.
Even in the realm of blogging, I used to worry about repeating myself. I don’t worry any more when I realize Daily Exhaust has been online since 2006 (almost 9 years). There’s new readers every day who have never seen my posts from this past spring, let alone posts from nine years ago.
If something is important to you, talk about it, write about it and make art about it again and again and again.

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