Originality is overrated

Having an original idea is really hard.

For any idea to arise, some preliminary ideas need to exist in order to put this novel idea within people’s grasp. The ancient greeks couldn’t have come up with quantum physics, because they lacked the 20th century substrate of ideas that quantum physics was built upon.

Ideas arise and spread around society like ripples in a pond. Whenever several ideas meet and overlap, they can be combined into a novel idea. There is a period of time between when the novel idea becomes possible, and when it becomes so widely spread as to be obvious: in this interim period, many people will have the same idea.

You are not likely to be the first one of them. Any concept you can think of was probably described on an obscure internet forum back in 2002; any clever pun you come up with has been tweeted to death already.

You’re more likely to have original ideas if you move at the frontier of knowledge. If you do original research, you have access to ideas only known to a handful of other people, and you have a high chance of being the first to something.

But if you work with the same ideas as everyone else? Unlikely.

Fortunately, being original is not at all necessary for making valuable contributions.

Think about it: if you’ve never heard of the idea before, then it’s still far from obvious in your circles. However many people have had the idea before, your friends don’t know about it yet. You can make a valuable contribution by telling them! They’re going to learn the idea from someone—might as well be you.

And this isn’t only about your local group of friends: there are many ideas considered obvious in one cultural milieu, while almost unheard of in another.

Take my go-to example, the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Very little in the Sequences is original; they are mostly ideas from Feynman, Korzybski, Gary Drescher, Judea Pearl, I. J. Good, and so on.

But were the Sequences valuable for me and thousands of other people? Absolutely! I wouldn’t have read any of the mentioned authors had I never ran into the Sequences! For me, the Sequences were novel.

Don’t worry about originality. If anything determines whose delivery of the same idea “wins”, it’s execution and production quality, more than strictly who thought of it when. And most of the time it’s not a competition anyway.

For anything reasonably novel you put out there, there will be many people who are hearing it for the first time—from you.