cf #102: nobody remembers what you said
how to work with this reality instead of fighting against it
You are reading contentfolks—a monthly(ish) blend of sticky notes, big marketing ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio
Hey there 👋
Almost a decade ago, a single sentence reshaped my understanding of effective communication: “when you start getting tired of saying it, that’s when other people are just starting to hear it.”1
That line was not about marketing, though it can describe what marketing is about: being intentionally redundant and repeating the same message out in market, over and over, so your brand eventually comes to mind when people are ready to take action.
No, that conversation was about an underrated leadership skill: understanding that nobody remembers what you said—and working with this reality instead of fighting against it.
The forgetting curve
The forgetting curve is a model that describes in theory what we all know in practice: overall, we are average, mediocre, really bad at retaining information after we encounter it for the first time.
Information retention is on the vertical axis, the passing of time on the horizontal one. The curve gets more or less steep depending on information complexity, our interest and attention levels, how good our memory is. But the general concept holds: as soon as we hear about or learn something new, we start to forget it. Fast.
The more time passes, the less information we retain—unless, twist!, we get exposed to it again, and then again, via spaced repetitions. Over time, the shape of the curve itself starts to change, as the things we initially struggled to retain get progressively harder to forget.
Since forgetting is a default memory setting, it doesn’t just show up when we learn new skills or blank on someone’s name four minutes after meeting them. It comes to work with us and there it compounds, too, in the gap between what people think they communicated and what has actually been absorbed.
The examples could go on forever, and all of them are extremely costly from an alignment, velocity, and motivation perspective:2
Leadership announced ambitious goals at the beginning of the year. The session was energising and you were excited about the direction—but now it’s been four months, and if someone asked you to repeat the goals verbatim it’s 50/50 on whether you could do it
Design announced the updated visual brand guidelines in Slack and received a ton of team-wide emoji praise—less than half a year later, nobody is referencing them and the wrong colours and assets are popping up everywhere
You shared career ambitions with your manager in a 1-2-1 and they listened, said the right things, and genuinely meant them—six months later, a relevant opportunity comes up, you hear nothing about it, and it goes to someone else
A cross-functional initiative got a green light in a Zoom meeting and everyone left feeling aligned—but now a few sprints have passed, cracks have appeared, and most people know what was decided but few remember why or how the decision was made in the first place
How you beat the forgetting curve
If you want people to absorb and retain your message, you have to intentionally repeat yourself and share it multiple times, at the right intervals, across different channels, without ever assuming that a single Slack ping, deck, or call will do the job.
That’s why “when you start getting tired of saying it, that’s when other people are just starting to hear it” felt so powerful.3 It made it obvious that when communication fails, the problem may be less in the message itself and more in the frequency (or lack thereof) with which it got delivered.
Here’s what that frequency might look like:
At Hotjar, whenever I was presenting work to the company, I’d start from a variation on this sentence: “Hey, this is fio for brand & marketing. As a reminder, our goal is to do X and Y, and here’s how the goal shows up in today’s update” → this helped get our team narrative across and ongoingly remind other people of what we were doing and why
At Aula, the weekly all-hands started with the CEO reading the company vision and mission out loud → by the time you’d been there three months, you’d have heard the same concepts repeated at least 12 times, which sure made them stick in your mind
At Float, the CRO introduced a visual metaphor to rally the team around a shared set of goals → he then repeated that same metaphor across several decks, in-person meetings, and written documentation to create a shared language across the org
Also at Float, whenever I lead a website meeting I start with a screenshare of the strategic roadmap and a reminder of where we are and where we are going → it only takes a couple of minutes, but it means every conversation starts from the same place
Was Aula’s CEO feeling redundant for saying the same thing for 100+ weeks in a row? Probably. Do I get bored of repeating the same message? Sometimes.
…but does it work? Always 😉
Back then, I thought the person saying it was a fine observer of human behaviour. Years later, I realised they were mostly quoting from LinkedIn’s former CEO, who was in turn quoting from a White House advisor. Because I am me and I enjoy a good research rabbit hole, I eventually tracked down a 2-minute video that I think is where this quote loop originates.
Worth spelling out here that people don’t forget because we are selfish, uninterested, or indifferent. That may be the case, at times—but mostly, it’s because we are not structurally designed to remember every bit of information we encounter once. A few minutes later, that same bit of information is already sliding doooooown the forgetting curve and into oblivion faster than a downhill ski athlete at the recent Winter Olympics (which I thoroughly enjoyed watching, by the way).
I have also since repeated this sentence 94356 times, which feels overall appropriate.