Let’s play a little game, shall we?
I’ll give you the beginning of a few sentences and you have to guess the second half correctly.
3… 2… 1… Go!
Kesariya tere ishq hai piya…
Neendein neendein rehti hain aaj kal…
Agg lavan majboori nu…
If you guessed them as ‘Rang jau jo mein haath lagau’, ‘bas uske hi khaabo ke libaas mein’, and ‘Aan jaan di pasoori nu’, you’re absolutely correct.
If you didn’t, well, that’s fortunate too. It just means you’re not spending a large chunk of your day scrolling instagram reels.
Most people my age and I, however, would fall in the first category.
So one day, one of my friends sent me a harmless reel where you had to answer a couple of question about your bestfriend to prove you actually know them well.
I answered all the questions that the reel asked. And spoiler – I only got 6 out of 10 right.
(PSA: things like these don’t actually say anything about your friendship. I know people who can’t spell their bestfriend’s surname. We just did that for kicks and giggles)
She sent that to multiple people and somehow everyone got the same question wrong.
It was – what’s my favourite colour?
Honestly, to me (and possibly to everyone else too) the obvious answer to that question was black.
I mean, she could never praise the colour enough, has various clothes in black colour and overall seemed to love it.
But that was not the case.
Her favourite colour turned out to be navy blue.
Navy blue.
I was shook.
It made me question if I actually knew anything about her.
But it also made me think about something else – how what we repeatedly say reflects on us, even if that is not entirely accurate.
You see, even though navy blue was her favourite colour, she would always talk about how much she loved black.
Over time, people started associating her with the colour black.
And even though that was not her favourite colour, they remembered it as such because she repeated it so often.
This kind of thing happens a lot in our day-to-day lives.
We might not realise it, but the things we repeatedly say become a part of our identity.
It might not be our favourite colour, or movie, or book – but people will remember it as such because we talked about it so often.
If you wanna make something stick in people’s heads, you gotta repeat it again and again, and then again. You might think they get the memo the first time, but trust me, they don’t.
This is the same reason you got the second half of those songs right. Because you heard them so often, you didn’t even have to think about what comes next.
It’s like your brain automatically fills in the blanks.
So the next time you want to make an impression or want people to remember something about you, just keep repeating it.
And another thing. You’re people too. If you wanna believe something about yourself, repeat it until it’s hammered in you.
One day it’ll become a part of your identity.
Recap for memory:
If you wanna make something stick in people’s heads, you gotta repeat it again and again, and then again. You might think they get the memo the first time, but trust me, they don’t.