Why Being Original May Not Be as Hard as You Think It Is

It really amazes me how some discoveries are made.

Take chocolate.

Cocoa beans on their own, I understand, taste pretty rank.

I can attest to the fact that even when processed into 100% cocoa solid chocolate, the taste is, at best, challenging.

To get from the pods in the tree to what we would recognise as chocolate today takes an incredibly complex, multi-stage process.

How did anyone just stumble upon that?

The same is true for coffee.

While a roasted coffee bean is not unpleasant, who discovered that the best thing to do was to roast them, ground them down, pour boiling water over them, and then remove the grounds before just drinking the liquid?

I have no idea how it happened, but I am very glad that it did!

So if these staple items have such a convoluted process to become what we are used to, how many other great things are we missing?

It is easy to think that the days of exploration and discovery are largely over, but that surely cannot be the case.

How can things that are easy to grow but either taste disgusting or are seen as largely useless be turned into something wonderful?

I am sure that we very far off trying all the possibilities!

It is not just food either.

Look how many discoveries are made as a result of accidents or while trying to solve another problem entirely.

Thank goodness that Alexander Fleming did not clean his petri dishes before leaving his lab that day, leading to the development of penicillin as a result of his slovenly behaviour.

As a writer, I have often worried about the originality of my work.

Certainly, plagiarism is a terrible thing, and the trend for AI to apparently steal from writers by being trained using their work without their permission is a huge worry.

But I have come to realise that originality is not about coming up with a completely new idea from first principles all the time.

Mathematicians do not all start with proving for themselves that 1+1=2 and then go on from there.

They learn what others have done before them and try to build on that.

The same applies from in every field of study.

We build on what has gone before to make or discover something new.

Sometimes it is the context that is original, or the combination of two existing ideas into something new in itself.

To go back to food for a moment, those that discovered how to fry eggs and how to produce bacon both made great breakthroughs.

But so did the first person to try serving them together!

There are still plenty of new ideas to be had, but they do not have to start from scratch.

In fact, that is a pretty good way to stop yourself having new ideas.

I read recently that in the game of chess, by move 4 there are already around 4 billion possible moves.

But what is interesting about chess is that the beginning of the game has been intensively studied.

There are a huge range of “book” openings, where certain combinations of moves have been analysed, the best responses devised, and what works and does not work determined.

If you want to make a breakthrough in chess, it is unlikely to be through a new opening.

But later in the game, there are so many possibilities that your chances of finding an original way to play are much greater, because there simply so many options.

Indeed, if there are more ways to shuffle a pack of cards than there are atoms in the universe, then how many books can be written pictures painted or songs composed?

Yes, some of them will be similar to others.

But is that a problem if they are not copies or thefts?

We all lead an original life.

Nobody else has or will live exactly as you have.

So we are all originals, with original thoughts, ideas, and responses.

Even if someone else has had some of those thoughts, almost certainly nobody has had all of them together in the same head as you do.

Combinations are powerful, and just as original as new base ingredients.

If you have ten items, there are over 3 and a half million different ways to order them.

That is assuming that you include all ten.

If you also allow for combinations of a small number of the ten items, the number is much, much bigger.

You have original combinations of ideas in your head right now.

It is a mathematical certainty.

So start experimenting.

It is easy to dismiss ideas by thinking that somebody must have thought of it before, tried it, and found it did not work.

But that is probably not the case.

It is easy to be original – just be yourself, and listen to your thoughts, however crazy they may seem at first.

All the biggest and most important ideas seemed crazy at first.

The visionaries were the people that pursued them anyway.

The next big idea could be in your head right now.

But no more recipes for brussels sprouts please – they are beyond redemption.