Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”
I meet a lot of people who want to create something great, but are always waiting for a new, unheard of, original, never-before seen, monumental idea to hit them. Guess what? They are still waiting. That is because ideas don’t come in the form of complete, packaged, out-of-the-box-ready-to-use ways. They come in a less sexy form of someone else’s idea. That’s right, they come from other people’s ideas that have inspired you in some way or another. Great ideas are just a re-packaged, re-purposed, re-interpretted forms of someone’s inspiration in us. So don’t wait for some amazing idea to come fall out of the sky and hit you in the brain…it rarely, if ever, happens.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Even the Bible tells us there is nothing new under the sun. Every idea has a seed that came from someone else’s idea. I remember one of my music teachers in high school telling us how to write songs. He said, “If you can’t come up with your own song, take someone else’s chord progression, or lyrics, and re-do it in your own way. Over time, you’ll start to find your own voice and style.” That advice made a big impact on me. I started to write songs that way, and guess what…I started to find my own voice. In fact, this song I wrote, “WHERE COULD I GO” came out of years of finding my own style and voice. I didn’t start writing song like this immediately, it took years of writing junk to get to here.
My challenge to you today is to start somewhere. Quit waiting and start to take the ideas that influence you and tweak them to make them yours. If you wait to be an original, you’ll miss out on becoming an original. Because you only become an original by doing unoriginal stuff at first.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” ~ Jim Jarmusch
So how do you get an original idea? You don’t. You tweak other people’s ideas until you get something that becomes your version of the idea. The create a video about it, post it on youtube and increase youtube views with TheMarketingHeaven.com. So go create something today!
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