The Myth of Originality

There’s no such thing as an original idea. Every “new” idea is a combination of old ideas presented in a different way.

“All ideas are second-hand”, Mark Twain wrote, “consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”

A few months ago I decided to explore book recommendations from some of my favorite authors. I realized how many of their brilliant ideas weren’t a result of their pure genius but rather a conglomeration of other people’s ideas, remixed in their own unique way.

The 4-Hour Workweek is filled with traces of ideas from “The E-Myth Revisited”, “The Magic of Thinking Big” and “The 80/20 Principle”.

James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits the best-selling book on Amazon in 2021, mentioned he frequently builds and iterates on the ideas of others. “Everyone wants to be original, but I’m not smart enough to have great ideas bubble up naturally without me building on something else.”

The most famous sentence James wrote in Atomic Habits: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

But, if you go back a few thousand years Archilochus, a Greek poet born in 680 BC, wrote: “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

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Πηγή: thomasdixon.substack.com