I Read 100 Creativity Books. This Is the Biggest Lie Artists Believe.

Does true originality actually exist? After reading more than 100 books about creativity, I think I finally found an answer. But it requires us to completely redefine what originality means. And to really understand that definition, first you must understand six key ideas about originality that I discovered buried inside all those books. If you're an artist, writer, musician, or creator of any type, you need to know this. Alright, let's dive right in. Imagine if I erased every influence you've ever had. Every song, every movie, every painting, every conversation. Every person who's ever taught you anything. What would you have left to create your art with? Well, Austin Kleon opened the book Steel Like an Artist with a claim that almost offended me. He said, all creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. Nothing? I mean, that sounds depressing, right? Well, that's until we start looking at our craft closely. Our favorite musician learned music by listening to other musicians. Our favorite painter learned from looking at other paintings. Our favorite filmmaker definitely watched films before making films. Even the language used to make this video was influenced by thousands of people. Yet somehow, I can still make something that feels like mine. And that right there, that's the mystery. Jonathan Ledham explores this in his essay, The Ecstasy of Influence. He wrote that substantially all ideas are secondhand. All ideas are secondhand ideas. You see, they come consciously or unconsciously from millions of outside sources. He said that when people call something original, nine times out of ten, they just don't even know the references or original sources. And then he even went deeper and he decided human consciousness itself as something stitched together. Which means influence is what all creativity is made of. Inside my book, Create or Die, I touch on how Mark Twain straight up said it. He said, there are no original ideas. And also wrote about how Oliver Sacks' research arrived at a similar conclusion from just a totally different direction. It showed that humans imitate. Like we absorb, we forget where things came from. And these fragments, they sink beneath our consciousness. And then one day, randomly, those fragments return. And they return completely changed, combined and mutated. And then we call that thing that came back an idea. And that actually leads to something that I wish more artists understood. Do you know what like a compost pile is? Like it's essentially just a pile of scraps of fruits and vegetables and coffee grounds and eggshells and all types of stuff. But mainly, it's just organic waste that breaks down naturally into nutrients for soil. And so my wife does this to have a healthy garden. And so my point that I'm trying to make is that your mind is not this empty room where ideas just appear. Your mind is a compost pile of everything you've seen, everything you've loved, everything you've hated, every conversation and heartbreak and painting and song, every place you've lived, every person you've met. It's just all of it, just all thrown in. And time breaks it down and eventually something new grows out of it, just like compost. So not from nothing, but from everything, something grows. So saying everything comes from somewhere, it begs the question, like if we're all borrowing from the past, why doesn't everything come out the same, right? Well, in the book, The Runaway Species, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brank said our brains has these three creativity buttons. And much of what we call invention can be traced back to pressing these three buttons in different combinations. Once you learn these three buttons, you literally start seeing them hiding behind paintings and companies and inventions and songs and probably even your own work. The buttons are bending, breaking and blending. Let me break down all three. And the examples I'm actually going to use are going to be straight from the book, OK? So bending is when you take something that already exists and you change it. So you stretch it, distort it. You push one aspect further. Like Monet painted the same cathedral, painted the same cathedral again and again and again, you know, and it was the same cathedral, just different perception based on the light, the time of the day. So the object didn't need to change the relationship to the object did. And so that's bending. And then there's breaking where you take something whole and you split it apart. Like Picasso looked at the traditional way of seeing things and asked, why does a face have to be seen from one angle at a time? And so cubism fractured reality and it rebuilt it. That's breaking. And then there's blending. Take two things that normally live in separate worlds and force them to meet. So there's things like biology plus technology, you get biotech or telephone plus computer plus camera plus music player and you get the iPhone. This is why creativity often feels magical from the outside. We always get to see the final combination, but we don't really get to see the ingredients. You know, like the magician doesn't produce a rabbit from nothing. You just didn't see where the rabbit came from. It's the same thing. Henry Ford once said, I invented nothing new. Like what? Him saying that, it always shocks me because essentially what he's saying is that he simply assembled into the automobile different discoveries made by people across centuries. Like really think about that. One of the most transformative creators in history essentially just said, I just combine things. So maybe genius isn't always inventing a new ingredient. Sometimes genius is just noticing that two ingredients belong together before everyone else does. Oh, yeah. Before I move on to things, if you want all my notes on creativity, my best ideas, I'll leave a link below for you to get them for free. And also, if you love creativity books and you want to nerd out with others who love creativity books, too, I'm thinking about starting an online creativity book club. If that sounds interesting to you, I'll leave a link in the description with a short form to let me know if you're interested. All right, let's move on. Um, OK, Leonardo da Vinci could not have invented the iPhone and he was a genius. So it's not because he wasn't creative enough. It's because creativity can only reach so far beyond what already exists. Like, I love how Steven Johnson actually explains this in the book, Where Good Ideas Come From. He shared a concept called the Jason Possible. And I think it's one of the most useful ideas a creator can understand. The Jason Possible is an attempt to explain how ideas evolve, especially like really good and innovative ideas. Like, imagine if all of civilization was standing in a room and inside the room is everything humanity currently knows how to do. And around that room are doors. Each door leads to the next thing we could possibly discover using what already exists in the room. Open one door and suddenly five new doors next to it become available. Open those and even more doors start to appear next to them. Now, according to this visual and the book, creativity doesn't happen anywhere once. It happens next door to already what exists. The book talked about how we probably couldn't have invented the microwave 20,000 years ago. And it's not because we were stupid, but it's just that too many doors haven't been opened yet. Like the door for electricity, electromagnetic radiation and industrial manufacturing, whatever, all these doors. You can't walk through a door that civilization hasn't built. That means even revolutionary ideas are usually the creator taking one surprising step sideways. Maybe the term we should say for innovating things shouldn't be one giant leap forward, it should be one giant leap sideways. I don't know, just a thought. But essentially, new things live beside the known things. And this actually explains one of the strangest patterns in history, where the same invention is often discovered by multiple people at almost the exact same time. Where they never met, they were on completely different parts of the world, but they came to the same ideas. There's things like calculus, evolution, the telephone, even photography. Yes, all of these were discovered by multiple people around the world at the same time. And all because enough doors have been opened. Many people, when all these doors are open, they can see the same room. And so originality isn't always seeing something no one could see. Sometimes it's being among the first to notice what have just become possible. Oh, Johnson also actually talks about another idea, about where good ideas come from that I really, really love. It's called exaptation, exaptation. And it was my first time hearing that word, but it comes from evolutionary biology. It describes how sometimes nature creates something for one purpose, and then later it gets hijacked for a completely different purpose. Like how feathers weren't originally meant for flight, or how the tongue went from feeding, but also is used for speech. So essentially the trait, it stays, but the job of that trait, it changes. And creativity does this constantly. In the book, Imagine, John actually wrote about a few examples of exaptation and creativity, like how Gutenberg combined his knowledge of a wine press and a coin punch to create the printing press, or how the Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to design the first airplane, or even how the search algorithm of Google was built by adapting the citation algorithm by some academic journals, and they just literally just applied it to the internet. Now, check this out though. So we have wine pressing, bicycles and airplanes and Google, all these random pieces, and they all already existed, but the relationship between those pieces, they didn't exist. And that right there might be one of the deepest lessons that I found across those books. Creators obsess over finding new ideas, but history's greatest creative breakthroughs often came from finding new relationships between old things. That's powerful. Okay, every artist needs to learn the lesson that Questlove learned when he wrestled with his creative identity in the book, Creative Quest. He looked at his own drumming and writing, and he admitted that his creative identity was made from pieces of other people's creativity. And then he asked a very important question. If you absorbed all these influences and you output them at exactly the right moment in some strange new combination, isn't that itself a highly creative act? Well, I think it is. Because I think there is a mathematical problem hiding behind all the creativity, and it's just permutations. And if you don't know what that is, I'll just break it down simply. Look, let's say you have 10 things in your mind, like you know 10 things. There's only so many different ways that you could combine those 10 things, right? Now, what if you know a hundred things? Or a thousand things? Or tens of thousands of experiences? Well, suddenly the number of possibilities and combinations, it becomes unfathomable. And no one else has exactly your inventory of knowledge and experiences and life and lived experiences. Nobody has read precisely what you read, met exactly who you met, failed exactly where you failed, been in love the way that you've been loved, and just noticed exactly what you've noticed along the way. Your experiences, it might not be unique individually, but their arrangement is. Rick Rubin described this beautifully in The Creative Act. He compared ideas to clouds. Like, the water itself isn't new. It's been circulating around the planet forever. The ocean, rain, river, vapor, and turning into a cloud. All the same water, just different formations. And that's why he said no two clouds are the same. And I just love that. Because the ingredients of the clouds are ancient, while the formation is completely new. And the art works the exact same way. I love it. As artists, our obsession with originality is dangerous. Because the harder we try to look original, the easier it becomes to make something unnatural. Elizabeth Gilbert talked about that in her book, Big Magic. She said most things have been done before, but they have not been done by you. And that right there, to me, it changes everything. Because she argues that creators might be better served by chasing authenticity instead of originality. She wrote that attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious. But something deeply authentic just somehow feels original without trying, you know? And I think that's because originality is often just a side effect of creation. Like, you can't force it. You get there unintentionally. You just absorb widely. You notice deeply. You follow your taste. And you live and you fail. And you get inspired just a little from this person, a little from that era, something from your childhood, from a stranger, from completely unrelated fields and things. And then you let it all collide inside of you. And eventually, eventually something comes out. And whatever comes out the other side, this has your fingerprints all over it. It's you. So the question is, does true originality exist? Is by originality you mean creating something completely untouched by anything that has ever came before it? Probably not. I couldn't find much evidence of that version of creativity in the books I've read. Almost every serious thinker that I've found, they pointed the other direction. Ideas have parents. Art has ancestors. Every door was built from materials found behind previous doors. But I don't think that means originality is fake. I just think that we kind of defined it completely wrong. Originality is not the absence of influence. It's the presence of an unusual combination of influences. It's not creating without ancestors. It's combining our ancestors in a way that creates a new descendant that will go on to influence somebody else. It's bending, and it's breaking, and it's blending. And it's why two creators could study the same artist and use the same tools, live in the same city, and still make completely different work. Because creativity, it's not just about what enters you. It's about what happens to you once it's inside of you. Julia Cameron actually wrote in The Artist's Way that we are the origin of our art. And I think that's the version of originality that we're actually chasing. Think about, could this have come through anyone but me, right? Stop trying to create from nothing. Do the opposite. Give yourself better material to work with. Go experience more and read outside your field. Study things that have nothing to do with your craft. Love weird things. Become interested in everything. Because the more ingredients you give your mind, the more combinations become possible. And somewhere between everything you borrowed, and everything you've forgotten, and everything you misunderstood, and everything you've lived, something can appear that the world has never quite seen before. All because it came through you. All right, look. If what comes out of us is shaped by what we let into us, then who we surround ourselves with matters too. And that's why I created the World of Creatives Collective. It's a private space online for hundreds of artists, and writers, and filmmakers, and musicians just from all around the world who want deeper conversations, better influences, and people who actually understand this creative life that we're living. And so if that sounds like the kind of room that you've been looking for, I will also leave a link to the application to the World of Creatives Collective below. All right, until next time, I'll see you in the next video.