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Ideas Aren’t Single-Use
Every Tuesday, The Productive Disruptive delivers storytelling science, message makeovers, cultural commentary, and a little rebellious hope for anyone still stubborn enough to believe communication can change the world.
Dorian Johnson
August 04, 2026
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While the majority of moviegoers went to see Spider-Man this past weekend,
I went to see Hadestown with my wife.
Limited theaters released it or something like that.
She was captivated.
I was unconscious.
Now hol up, this is not an indictment of Hadestown.
I sugar-crashed in an extremely comfortable reclining seat and fell asleep. Orpheus never stood a chance after I had gushers and a soda at my big old age.
Once I regained consciousness, I learned that Hadestown retells the ancient Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
People have been telling this story for thousands of years.
The writer put that thang down, flipped it, and reversed it…
Another story inside a thousand-year-old story.
There is some self-imposed pressure on storytellers to find an idea nobody has touched before.
The moment we see something similar, we might tell ourselves:
Welp. Someone already did it.
And the idea goes to the metaphorical trash bin.
Don’t throw it away; it could be a great start. Try these three ways to try another story.
1. Retell it
A retelling keeps something recognizable from the original while changing its setting, format, stakes, or context.
Hadestown takes an ancient myth and filters it through folk and jazz music, labor, poverty, power, and climate.
The bones are familiar. The surrounding world changes what those bones mean.
For your own storytelling, ask:
Where else could this story happen?
A story about burnout would likely feel different across a hospital, a classroom, and a health department. The central tension can remain while the setting reveals entirely different pressures.
2. Resample it
Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “luther” samples Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s version of “If This World Were Mine,” which itself is a cover of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s original.
In 2026, “luther” won Record of the Year.
The source material had already lived several lives. Kendrick and SZA heard another possibility inside it.
Storytellers can do the same thing by combining an existing idea with another influence, experience, or body of knowledge.
Ask:
What can I place beside this story that changes how people experience it?
You might combine a personal story with a statistic, a public health lesson with a scene from pop culture(I do this damn near daily😂), or a current event with a moment from your childhood.
Same ingredients, different dish. Tomatoes and onions can show up in pico de gallo or shakshuka. You get to decide.
3. Recenter it
Percival Everett’s James revisits Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through Jim’s perspective.
The shift in narrator changes what readers can see, whose motivations matter, and which questions the story asks(and answers). That reimagining won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It’s even in development to be a film produced by Steven Spielberg
Ask:
Who has been standing at the edge of this story?
Move that person, community, consequence, or perspective toward the center and see how the meaning shifts.
🧠 Story Science Side Note: In educational psychology, analogical transfer happens when we recognize the structure underneath one example and apply it somewhere else.
We recognize a useful tension, character dynamic, emotional arc, or narrative structure. Then we transfer it into another context.
There’s also an idea of “cross-curricular connections” linking two or more subjects to a lesson to help with building deep knowledge.
Personally, I do this as often as possible when I’m in classrooms.
Strong storytellers look beneath the surface. They identify what makes a story work, then decide where else that structure could live.
📝 Message Makeover:
Before:
“I need an idea nobody has ever had.”
After:
“What can I retell, resample, or recenter?”
Originality becomes less intimidating when you turn it into something you can actually do. Have you heard that thing where like there’s nothing new under the sun and there never will be?(a little crass, but).
Even PhD level stuff, right? Looking at established concepts through a new lens can help classify your work as “original”
Good enough for a PhD but not good enough for a story you wanna tell? Of course it is.
🛠️ The PHacilitator’s Corner:
Choose one story, presentation, post, or idea you’ve already created.
Give yourself three possible ways back into it:
Retell it: Where else could this story happen?
Resample it: What unexpected influence, experience, or idea could you combine with it?
Recenter it: Whose perspective has been standing at the edge of the story?
By the end, you could have a new story angle ready to develop.
Keep practicing this, though, and you’ll build something even more valuable: the ability to recognize connections across subjects, stories, and experiences.
I need to yell y’all about Wispr Pro.
I used it the entire last month of July, and I am just blown away.
Look up my little report card if you will.
A new definition of yapping
So I actually strongly hate the idea of optimization culture and always needing to be efficient.
But they did something with this one, not gon lie.
If you are interested, you can have a free month at the link below.
And I am a little typewriter, for real, for real.
Over 90 words per minute, but this saves me so much time typing, and it delivers differently from dictation.
If you’re interested, try it out, highly recommend!
I can actually “tell” in my storytelling now. How freaking wild is that?