Day 43: You'll Get Sick of Saying It Before They Get Sick of Hearing It

Note to self: you're going to get sick of saying it before people get sick of hearing it.

This hit me hard this week as I'm deep in the promotion phase of the business. I'm telling the same stories over and over again, and honestly, I'm getting tired of my own voice. But then I remembered something from Gino Wickman's Traction — people need to hear something eight times before they actually start listening.

Eight times. You're well and truly sick of saying it before people start to hear it.

The Henry Ford Billboard Story

There's a great story about Henry Ford that puts this in perspective. He was walking past a marketing billboard every day, getting more frustrated each time he saw it. Finally, he marched into the marketing team's office and demanded to know when the advertisement needed to be replaced.

Their response? "It hasn't even been published yet."

Ford was already tired of seeing his own message before his customers had seen it once.

The Math Behind Message Fatigue

The numbers tell the same story:

• Internal staff: 8 touchpoints before they truly hear the message
• B2B customers: 11 touchpoints before they're close to converting

In both cases, you hit message fatigue long before your audience hits message saturation.

Applying This Right Now

What I'm learning is that by the time you've constructed the story, refined the narrative, and crafted the learning, you're already over it. And that's before you've even published anything.

Case in point: I've been sharing variations of "systems thinking for business owners" for weeks now. I'm bored senseless by my own message. But yesterday, someone reached out saying they'd just discovered my work and found it incredibly helpful.

They weren't experiencing my message overload. They were experiencing the opposite — they were just starting to notice what I was saying.

The Reflection Question

So here's what I'm asking myself, and what you might want to consider: What story are you sick of that you know you need to keep telling?

For me, it's the systems message. I know it needs repetition across different channels and contexts because most business owners haven't heard it even once from me.

The insight from Wickman's eight-times rule has become my razor for staying consistent. When I feel that familiar fatigue creeping in — that sense of "surely I've said this enough times" — I remind myself that most people haven't heard it even once.

The trick isn't finding new stories. It's accepting that the good ones need to be told again and again, in different ways, until they finally break through the noise and stick.