Life is a Repeat

Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the corporate world is that everything is a repeat. Every task I do has already been done before in some form or another. I have to reconcile a balance at quarter-end, teach a new hire a task, write an email asking for support, etc. It’s all been done before and will be done again. This is applicable to any line of work, not just accounting. The farmer plants the same crops every year in the same field. A doctor performs the same surgeries or heals the same sicknesses. It’s easy to become complacent week after week—and even easier to ask, what is this all for?

The answers are numerous but I think Steve Jobs said it best. While discussing the technology he was building, he knew it’d be outdated soon—left in the past and never looked at again. In an eloquent way, he described his work:

“It's sort of like a sediment of rocks. You're building up a mountain, and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. No one will see it, but they will stand on it.”

Simply put, the purpose of repeating is to make it incrementally better for yourself the next time you have to do the task—or leave it in a better spot for the next person to take over. Just like when you borrow a friend’s car, you might clean it or fill up the gas tank as a thank-you.

Further, we should not get bogged down by the idea that we have to repeat a task, but be thankful we have the opportunity to complete it again. Why? If we get used to the idea that everything in life is a repeat, we’ll come to understand that we have to do these things in order to move forward. There is no forward movement in life without repetition. We either do it better or do it the same—which eventually means worse—because someone else is improving, and we stayed the same.

If we all had the attitude of “It’s been done before, so I won’t try,” we wouldn’t have better phones, movies, rockets, etc. Personally, I had to contemplate writing a kids' business book because I thought to myself, “There’s got to be a million books out there already.” This was only partially true. There are some books out there, but they didn’t touch on certain subjects, and the stories weren’t written in the way I liked. This is true of every remake of a movie. My favorite movie is Scarface (1983), starring Al Pacino. Little did I know, this was a remake of a 1932 film called Scarface. Someone saw the 1932 film and said, “I can do it better,” and they did just that.

All this to say, I think it’s incumbent upon us adults to embrace repetition—not for the sake of repetition, but for progress. If we aren’t making a better future for the children we have, we’ve done a disservice to humanity.

While we may never know the meaning of life, we can know its purpose: to progress. Are you building the mountain—or just eroding it?