My best stuff is stolen

All Pembroke Welsh Corgis look pretty much the same to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to meet and pet all of them. (Image by Szabolcs Molnar)

I have an Akimbo friend who worries about being original.

He is hesitant even to repeat and build on ideas he's heard elsewhere. He’s afraid to publish, lest he rip someone off.

I can empathize. Sometimes, it might feel like we have nothing to add to someone else's brilliant work — we have the sense that we're cheapening it instead of elevating it.

Worse, we fear that we are unwittingly copying someone else's work and passing it off as our own because we've forgotten where we heard it.

Well, almost three years into writing this blog, I really don't worry about that anymore.

I believe that we each have a unique blend of influences from the people we've known, the things we've read, seen, and heard, and the experiences we've had.

These influences combine to create our own unique perspective. We develop a distinctive lens through which to view the world and a distinctive voice we can use to share what we understand and believe.

When we start out, we may have a narrower range of influences than we will ultimately discover. Our early attempts to create may well be mimicry. This is done by the best of the best: Look no further than Paul McCartney’s reverent re-creation of Little Richard’s masterpiece, “Long Tall Sally,” complete with George’s best Chuck Berry riffs. Or Bob Dylan's faithful impression of his hero, Woody Guthrie, in which he sings his own song with an Oklahoma twang even though he is from Minnesota.

Over time, artists go from outright impersonations to pastiche to, eventually, works that might be construed as original. It's a process, and why would we assume that we can skip it?

I gave up on trying to be original a long time ago, and I gave up on worrying about stealing other people's ideas. It's hard enough to try to come up with an idea in the first place without the added burden of ensuring that it isn't someone else's. I'm probably not going to quote a line or melody word for word, anyway — it will come out remixed, rearranged, reimagined.

If you've read a lot of the same books and blogs, watched the same TED talks, and listened to the same podcasts as I have, you might discover a lot of familiar ideas in my work. I couldn't fix that if I tried. It's not something to fix — it's something to accept. Ironically, to keep developing my own ideas, I can continue to broaden my exposure to the ideas of others.

As a matter of fact, familiarity is kind of nice. We Seth Godin acolytes, for instance, tend to have a shared worldview that's based on his work. Algorithm-driven recommendation engines assume that we will like stuff that is similar to other stuff we already like. Only the people on the leading edge want stuff that's totally new, and even then they only want it in certain areas of life, like tech or music.

There's nothing wrong with creating something that harmonizes with something that already exists. All my best stuff is stolen. I can't tell anymore which ideas came directly from someone else and which are, if not original, at least fresh ways of combining existing concepts.

I don't think it matters that much exactly where stuff came from, anyway. If I spent an hour writing this post, I must have created something new; otherwise, these words could have been copy-pasted from elsewhere in a matter of seconds. Just as I can't help but include ideas that I've picked up along the way, I can't help but put my own spin on them. This melding of ours and theirs is what the creative process has always been. The more we practice, the better we get at it. To start, we can let go of our concern about copying other people. Of course we will do it, and that’s nothing to be afraid of.