Talks about a lot of things about being original. Found it a fun read and this one struck a chord with me:
> The alternative is a pursuit towards truth. In the words of C.S. Lewis, who is famous for the vivid imagination he presented in stories like the Chronicles of Narnia: “No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original—and doesn’t notice it.”
I find a parallel working in technical problem where a good solution comes from getting to understand the problem in fundamental ways and the most basic representation and process to solve it imaginable with that understanding is called creative or original. The goal was never to 'be clever', in fact 'thinking dumb' as in "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" is far more effective.
It’s a long fluffy article that doesn’t even include the source of the famous quote. Miles Davis said this and would reference how important the fundamentals are to any instrument like the drums:
“Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it's like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.”
The author definitely knows how to optimize SEO, but not even googling their own title of an article and including one of the more famous examples seems a bit odd to me.
There’s quite some claims that modern creators are afraid to imitate each other? Has the author opened up TikTok, YouTube, or copied a popular tweet into Google to see the thousands of copycats getting the same recognition in their own bubbles of the world?
Weird, I thought it was a great article. One that actually gets better as it progresses. I don't see how it's fluffy at all.
In the first half, he is mainly referring to the current state of fine-arts, which is still in the grip of the "originality disease". It's a different way of describing a particularly outgrowth of modernism, the rejection of bourgeois values, which included conformity, propriety, and the existence of objective truth and beauty. The horrors of World War 1 were the turning point, how could something so grotesque arise in the pinnacle of civilization after all. The author mentions the influence of Freud's work, which absolutely demolished the collective psychic order, turning everybody into a neurotic.
Interesting too, is that he really highlights the self-absorption which underlies modern/contemporary "high" fine arts. That criticism is not new. The first real critical assault on modernism was in the seventies. However, it didn't stick, instead it turned ideals of bourgeois respectability into a form of pageantry. Think a critic like Tom Wolfe as an anachronistic dandy, or the weird Lego-classicism of postmodern skyscrapers. But the core of that criticism stands though: a half-century later, and we have still not overcome the absolute degeneration of artistic production.
I hope to see by the end of my lifetime that we have dug out of this hole, and art is unabashedly the pursuit of truth and beauty again. That will require artists and their patrons to stop navel-gazing though.
> In _The Jazz Theory Book_, Mark Levine defines playing in the pocket simply as grooving, where the rhythm section is locked in and working as a unit.
> in the pocket - When the music is rhythmically in a groove.
> groove - The “lock” between members of a rhythm section playing well together.
"In the pocket" has to do with a certain feeling or "groove" that occurs when the bass player and drummer sort of "lock in" (that's my terminology). I definitely know when I'm "in the pocket" but it's one of those things that's difficult to describe.
Seems odd to me to deem a post labeled as a long-form essay as "fluffy", especially when most of the "fluff" is substantial arguments padded with well-researched support. I personally perked up at the sight of a short scrollbar, it was a good read, I gained some security in my own case of Originality Disease.
I don't think a slew of bullet points could have accomplished the same.
Sometimes, it amazes me how some of you reason, the article deeply reflected on some crucial things that I personally I can relate to, and the only thing you could point out is one stupid famous quote that know one has idea about.
I am a long time practitioner of Aikido, and it certainly applies to that. A very common trap for many is to attempt ha/ri when they have not mastered shu.
>To me, the idea of Shu Ha Ri provides thinking tools, a language and a frame of reference to approach learning a new skill. When you are first learning something, variety of ideas isn’t usually the most helpful place to start. Once you get the basics down, then move on to experimenting and looking to integrate new thoughts or ideas. Your experiments will lead you to new paths and eventually you’ll move beyond the specific practices and evolve your own way of doing things.
Bruce Lee's famous quote: “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”
What’s the old joke about asking more and more technical people how a light switch works and the child’s explanation at the beginning and the physicists at the end are identical but in between becomes horrendously complicated…
Research isn't mentioned, but this is good advice for research too. If you want to make a contribution to research you have to know the field, and be able to re-implement what others have done, before you can add anything.
The whole concept of "originality" does not make sense to me, tbh. Who cares?
If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon rainforest, with no contact to the outside world, come up with a movable-type-style contraption to impress patterns onto woven cloth, that's a creative thought - and your fellow tribe would consider it "original", even though you do not know that a few hundred years earlier, some guy in central Europe had that idea before (and some Chinese guy even earlier). You are in no way less an inventor if you come up with something that has been thought of before, but forgotten.
We should start celebrating creativity (new ideas) instead of originality (uniquely new ideas). The quest for proving or disproving prior art is ultimately not moving us as a society forward.
> Who cares?
> If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon rainforest...
Actually, there is a creativity's dark side that could makes us care. Members of a tribe will perform their gathering and hunting tasks, and achieve some degree of creativity on tools, organization and processes to optimize their resources and live happily. Creativity is nice up to this point. Now imagine what happens when they create this powerful idea, of building a pyramid of ash, so they burn all the trees around. And this have actually happened on different cultures.
Not to mention that someone having "thought of that" at some prior point isn't a good reason not to explore it from your own perspective; your predecessors were not perfect or all-knowing.
While I agree that imitation is a preferred way to greatness,
> Modern creators do the opposite though.
Make me react with [Citation needed]. The article sets up to defeat a big straw man and doesn't spend enough effort motivating why it is supposed to be true (or for that matter, different to how it was before).
I feel like this thesis is confirmation bias at work. How many mediocre renaissance painters have you heard of? How many are possible to even have heard of? I'd guess not many.
Whenever I am learning something with zero knowledge, certainly, I imitate. As I gain more knowledge, I start to see patterns that allow me to branch out. I feel like this is a natural progression of things.
That's what we did with Avo. We started to create a Laravel Nova clone because we found its utility immense.
Somewhere along the way, we figured out that our users have different needs, and the whole project pivoted to something else, becoming a unique product in itself that better serves our users than we initially thought.
Without imitating the original, we wouldn't have come up with this wonderful product that helps teams save tons of time.
There is this video of Steve job's quoting, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." [0] That one hits me the most. To steal an idea you really have to understand it and find ways to integrate into the system and design. Copying is really straightforward.
"Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - credited to jazz trumpeter Clark Terry (b 1920), so hardly a new concept. Also, these days I see a lot of content creators only making it to the first stage, mindlessly aping others or creating short-form unoriginal material for TikTok etc; being 'original' seems not really to be a priority.
I think there's two reasons that things seem less original these days: Prior to the internet that first stage was hidden from view until someone made it to the second stage. Digital tools have made creation accessible to pretty much everyone with the technology.
I'm not sure I know TikTok content too well but I think it's a good thing that people are creating a little more than consuming. Even if it's a blatent copy of something else.
Re: the story at the start about watching a movie with a director and seeing them look at the movie different than the author did: I heard a great workshop by Chris Thile, MacArthur genius grant recipient and mandolin player. He said "we argue about this in the band, but I feel like once you're a serious musician, you can't ever enjoy music like lying back in the spa pool and letting it wash over you. You're always going `how does this make me feel? what about it is making me feel that way? how is it constructed? what's similar to other music i've heard? what's different?'."
We shouldn't be surprised that a creator's knowledge of a product exceeds that of the consumer. We should expect that we'll need to acquire that level of expertise and critical thought about a problem or solution space to be effective in the world.
ie. you need to spend time imitating others, but then more time totally grokking it to fully appreciate the whys, costs, & benefits of the old approach before trying to innovate past it.
Admittedly, the alliterative title is catchy. Curious if what occurs in the learning process is really "pattern recognition," then innovation. When a child learns to play the piano, are they "imitating" Bach and Beethoven or recognizing patterns of chord progressions? When a child learns to read/write, they are probably not imitating childhood authors per se, rather, learning patterns in how words are assembled.
Perhaps, creativity is simply an extension of the same process. Recognize pleasing patterns, learning which can be broken, and assembling those patterns in a new way?
Were the elements about Collison and Stripe necessary for this essay? I don't see what value these parts add. The conclusion that Stripe is original by not being original confirms that these parts don't belong to an essay about innovation. Collison is an intriguing person, though, and Stripe's focus on developer UX for payment processing was innovative, but maybe focusing on the actual innovation would have been too unoriginal to write about in 2022? Maybe writing about who Collison was imitating would have been more relevant.
I'm bootstrapping a SaaS business with the same approach, I've been imitating and iterating over what I see other's have been doing, while trying to be original (but very conservative) in some parts.
Hopefully, when I decide the imitation part is good enough (mostly in terms of feature parity), I add one of my more original ideas for a feature to the product.
I cofounded a startup a few years ago that ended in an acquihire. If I could redo it, I realize we didn’t front load a killer feature.
We spent too much time on table stakes so we’d look like competitors, there wasn’t much that set us apart to endear us to the alpha user base. We only developed some really novel things after like nine months. Looking back (and for next time), I’d have greatly descoped what we needed to imitate and gotten on those killer features asap.
Back in the 90s the Microsoft version was "Embrace and Extend" which really meant, adopt a standard and then change it so that the original implementation no longer works.
> Wouldn't "imitate then innovate" just lead us to very efficient horse carriages instead of cars?
But early cars WERE based on horse carriages; they literally did NOT reinvent the wheel, but instead strapped a combustion engine onto a horse carriage. Then did they start - or continue - innovation with things like suspension, tires, brakes, and later on safety systems etc.
I don't think so, for two reasons. First, a lot of things one the way from a horse carriage to a car are actually the same, like wheels and seats. They diverge later on.
Second, the article promotes innovating from other fields, not your own field. That might mean a carriage moved by a steam engine, for example, which also brings you closer to a car.
> The alternative is a pursuit towards truth. In the words of C.S. Lewis, who is famous for the vivid imagination he presented in stories like the Chronicles of Narnia: “No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original—and doesn’t notice it.”
I find a parallel working in technical problem where a good solution comes from getting to understand the problem in fundamental ways and the most basic representation and process to solve it imaginable with that understanding is called creative or original. The goal was never to 'be clever', in fact 'thinking dumb' as in "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" is far more effective.