Is Originality Overrated?
What is originality? It’s when you get ideas that have not been thought of before.
Why is it important? Because novelty subverts expectations. It leads to the creation of something fresh, new, and well…original. Nothing like it has existed before; it’s a true contribution to the knowledge pool of humanity.
The problem, however, is that if you have thought of something, it is very likely that someone else has also thought of it. That is what makes originality hard. There are 8 billion¹ brains thinking and what are the chances that your brain has thought of something that other brains haven’t? It’s 0.0000000125%. If that is not infinitesimal enough, consider all the humans that have ever walked on Earth - 117 billion² brains. What about the thoughts each brain has? The average human has 178 million thoughts during his/her lifetime. If we take that into account, then the chances of thinking something original is 5 x 10^(-20). Infinitesimally infinitesimal. For scale, the chances of a candidate cracking the Indian Civil Services exam (UPSC), one of the toughest exams in the world, is 0.13%³.
If it is this hard, can originality ever be overrated? And yet, it is overrated in some sense. But before we talk about that, let us look at how ideas themselves are formed.
What are ideas?
Ideas are the output generated by our brains. We can understand this using a mathematical analogy:
Y = f(x)
where Y are the ideas you create (output), function f() is your brain and x is what you feed your brain (input).
x is anything that you experience be it cognitive, sensory, social, or emotional; x is anything you feed your brain by consuming text (books, blogs, tweets), audio (podcasts, conversations with friends & family, Clubhouse conversations), video and images (memes, YouTube, Netflix); x is the experience you have accumulated so far.
Our brain is the function that operates on this input and generates an output i.e ideas. With that out of the way, let's look at why originality is overrated.
Ideas are art
Ideas are like a piece of art and like Todd from Bojack Horseman says, it’s more about what people get out of it than it is…
