Revisiting your old stuff
And why it's OK to recycle it
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 329
For the longest time, I held a rigid, almost puritanical belief about writing and content creation: that every piece of work had to be brand new.
If I had written about a specific productivity hack six months ago, I felt that revisiting the topic was a form of laziness—or worse, cheating my audience.
I convinced myself that if a reader had seen it once, they had "consumed" it, and offering it up again was just rehashing old news.
I lived in constant fear of being "found out" as someone who didn't have a bottomless pit of fresh ideas.
I was wrong.
I’ve since realized that recycling your material isn't just OK—that it’s a fundamental necessity for any creator who wants to build a sustainable body of work.
Here’s why I finally stopped obsessing over novelty and started embracing the reprise.
1. Your Audience is Always Evolving
The reality is that your audience today is not the same audience you had a year ago.
You have new subscribers, new followers, and new readers who haven't scrolled back through your archives to find that gem you wrote in 2024.
By repurposing your best work, you are ensuring that your most valuable insights actually reach the people who need them now, not just the people who happened to be there when you first hit publish.
2. Reinforcement Through Repetition
We live in an age of information overload.
The average person is bombarded with thousands of messages a day.
If you share a great point once, there is a statistically high probability that your audience scrolled past it, missed it entirely, or simply forgot it.
Repeating a core concept—perhaps framed in a slightly new way—reinforces the message. Sometimes, people need to hear something three or four times before the aha! moment finally clicks.
3. The Perspective of Time
When you revisit an old topic, you aren't just copying and pasting; you are applying your current self to the past.
You’ve learned more.
You’ve refined your craft.
Your opinions may have shifted or matured (the theme of this article being a prime example!).
When you recycle old material, you often end up updating it with new context, better examples, or more efficient solutions.
It becomes an evolution of the idea, not a carbon copy.
4. Maximizing Creative Energy
Burnout is the silent killer of any long-term creative project.
If you force yourself to reinvent the wheel every single day, you will eventually run out of momentum.
Recycling allows you to take your evergreen content—the stuff that is always useful—and package it for different mediums.
Turn that blog post into a thread, a video, or an email newsletter.
It’s not cheating; it’s being a better steward of your own best work.
5. Quality Over Quantity
I used to prioritize the freshness of content above all else.
Now, I prioritize the value of content.
If an idea is solid, it doesn’t have a shelf life.
It is far better to share one truly impactful, well-crafted lesson multiple times than to dilute your brand with a flood of mediocre, never-been-seen filler just to satisfy an arbitrary need for novelty.
The shift in my mindset was simple: I stopped viewing my archives as a graveyard of "used" ideas and started seeing them as a library of assets.
Stop punishing yourself for having good ideas that are worth repeating.
Your best work deserves to be seen, and if that means sharing it again, then share it again and do so with confidence.
What is one piece of content you’ve created in the past that you think deserves a second look today? For me, it’s an article I wrote about two years ago about Steve Jobs. Guess what the next article is about?
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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P.S. If you found this useful, share it with another creator who needs an ego check (in a nice way). Want more unfiltered takes on content creation? Join my newsletter. No fluff, just the stuff that works.
Next time on Shaking the Tree: Lessons from Steve Jobs
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.