My Greatest Writing Hit
Robert recently wrote about the American songwriter and producer Desmond Child, who used one of his musical creations in multiple songs. A creative way of recyling material by making little changes, so that it magically fits in new pieces.
It reminded me of a text I have used and re-used on multiple ocassions, most recently in this piece in the context of the June 2025-edition of the IndieWeb Carnival. The original piece, which I wrote back in 2018, features a life-changing question a friend asked me on a trip to Nice, France, which eventually led to my current career as a computer science- and software development teacher.
Since publishing the original I have used the basis of this text as the underlying written story for multiple job application cover letters: three times for a position at a secondary school and once at an applied university.
I got accepted in the position every time.
Reusing a piece of content multiple times after creating it once is nothing new. Live performers like actors or singers do it all the time: a theatrical piece is written once and performed dozens, even hundreds of times. A band plays the same setlist in concerts halls all over the world.
It's just the concept of textual content like blog posts, for which this feels a little more weird and unusual. But in the end, it is exactly the same.