Nobody Is Original. Get Over It.

I can tell you exactly what happens, because it happened to me. I started thinking. Overthinking, if we're being honest. My mind got tangled up trying to figure out if, just like my hands needed a reset after the surgery, my head needed one too. Without requiring an actual mental breakdown to get there. Ha.

So I turned my attention to one of my local heroes, someone who's been having practical, tangible conversations with creatives for a while now. This series is the synthesis of those conversations, worked out over a couple weeks where I had nothing to do but sit still and think.

First thing that came up was something I needed to hear:

Every person making things right now started with borrowed material. Borrowed language, borrowed rhythms, borrowed ways of seeing. The idea that a truly original idea exists, untouched by anything that came before it, is a fantasy that mostly just slows people down.

Not knowing what came before you doesn't make you a blank slate. It makes you uninformed. The people who make the most distinct work aren't the ones avoiding influence. They're the ones who studied their influences so closely that those influences quietly became instinct.

Here's the part nobody tells you. Chasing originality on purpose usually backfires. You end up twisted into something strange just to avoid looking like anyone else, and it reads as exactly that: strained. But when you stop worrying about whether it's been done before and just try to say the true thing, honestly, in your own words, originality tends to show up on its own. You don't even notice it happening.

There's a real difference between studying someone's work closely enough to understand why it holds up, and lifting it wholesale without doing anything to it. The first one is how every working creative actually learns their craft. The second one is just theft. Know which one you're doing.

What we owe the people who shaped us isn't pretending we invented it ourselves. It's the honesty to admit where it came from, and the discipline to keep working until it's fully ours.

So the next time you're sitting in a room and someone shoots down an idea because "that's basically what another team already did," push back. The question was never whether it's been done.

The question is whether you made it true for the specific people you're actually making it for. That part can't be copied.