This is a note to self, a journal of sorts. You might find it relevant too…
Regular readers of this blog will know all about my love of podcasts, and how much I enjoy pairing a listening session with a long walk. This enables me to consume all my favourite content in auditory form while getting my steps in, with the added benefit of assuaging my guilt for the otherwise sedentary lifestyle that my job and my other pastimes encourage. The other thing I appreciate about podcasts is that they let me be a fly on the wall for conversations between smart people. Just the other day I listened to and was inspired by a conversation between organisational psychologist Adam Grant and best-selling author of The Martian, Andy Weir.
The Martian is a masterpiece of storytelling, but I was even more impressed to learn that Andy Weir has written other scintillating books. That said, one of my key takeaways from the conversation is something I've talked about on this blog before, more than once. I was reminded of the notion that there's hardly a thing as a purely original idea, because it's all been done before.
Case in point, the Martian is about a man stranded in a previously-inhabited, deserted place where he has to make do with little provisions to survive. He has to learn to grow his food in an inhospitable climate and keep himself company with incoherent and technical soliloquies alike. As the book (and movie) title implies, this happens on Mars, but if you recast it and situate it right on Earth instead of Mars, on the blue planet instead of the red planet, then the storyline might start to sound familiar. You might think it sounds like Tom Hanks' Cast Away, or perhaps something older, like the 18th Century novel Robinson Crusoe, which, fun fact, Cast Away was based on. Another fun fact, Robinson Crusoe was based on a real-life story, just fictionalised for dramatic effect.
The point is this, it's all been done before, so any new idea you latch onto doesn't have to be original. In fact, it is unlikely to be. However - and here's the catch - the details are where the originality lies. In other words, originality isn't a pipe dream. Rather, it is very much attainable if you're willing to apply yourself to the art.
What I've learned from this, and what I'd like to suggest to you, is that the fear of unoriginality shouldn't hold you back from pursuing artistic exploits. Each idea is worth something in its potential for execution, and while not every idea will be golden, you can only latch on to the good ones by generating a lot of them, most of them bad. It's a numbers game at the end of the day. Going back to the conversation, Weir outlined some of the ideas he'd had and laughed at how ridiculous they sounded out loud, at which point Grant remarked that it reveals something about Weir's success. Grant posited that Weir seems to generate a lot of bad ideas, just like the most creative people, as backed up by the research. This is all to say that Ideas are a dime a dozen, but it's the execution that brings the art to life.
PS: Just a reminder that my latest record, One More Time is out now, everywhere. You can listen to it on several platforms. Please share it with a friend, share it with your social networks, and consider subscribing to the newsletter (below), my YouTube channel, or wherever else you listen to music.