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Founders need constant reminders
What religions share
Religion has outlasted companies, cities, and countries, and the main religions share a few things. They have a shared base of knowledge, usually a book. Believers meet at regular intervals, and they go back to the same books and the same stories over and over again.
Church for entrepreneurs
A podcast about founders works the same way, like church for entrepreneurs: it is the same personality type appearing across history, building ships in one era and technology in another. The constant reminder that something is important matters more than the lesson.
Plain reminders
The reminders themselves are plain: talk to users more, ship products earlier, get more feedback, and hold a higher bar for who gets recruited and hired. They are unglamorous, and people who give this advice a million times still catch themselves not applying it.
Why do religions repeat the same stories?
Sociologist Émile Durkheim argued in his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that shared rituals bind a community together. Repeating the same texts and practices gives members a common memory and a common language. Before writing was widespread, repetition was also how knowledge was carried from one generation to the next. Weekly gatherings, such as the Jewish Sabbath and Christian Sunday services, are among the oldest regular rhythms in human societies.
Why does repeated reminding work better than cramming?
Studies of spaced repetition show that review spread over time produces better long-term memory than the same review done all at once. A 2006 meta-analysis by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues reviewed over 300 experiments on the spacing effect. Each reminder arrives just as the memory has begun to fade, which strengthens it. The effect traces back to Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve experiments in 1885.
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