Creativity vs Originality
This week we are talking about creativity.
Honestly, I don't know how to stop talking about a juicy subject matter like this in a week 🙈 Let me try my best to put together a few big ideas about creativity as a creative professional. Most of them are contrarian.
There are a few words that gets thrown at me almost everyday as a part of my profession. Out of which the two most confusing words are creativity and originality. This is typically thrown by people who have no idea about neither creativity nor originality. It took me one decade to truly understand both the words at its root.
While I was able to define creativity here, I truly believe there is nothing original in this universe. Everything is a remix. It is remixed to an extent it feels original but in all honesty it is just a remix.
A quote which truly inspired me to think deeply is
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
Here is my take.
The words “from scratch” means from nothing. He starts all the way from the time before the world existed. If we start from there, we must go through Big Bang, expanding universes, ions, atoms, black holes, galaxy, sun, moon, earth, oceans, evolution, dinosaurs, homoerectus, homo sapiens, fire, agriculture, cooking, pre frontal cortex and more. You literally start from the beginning.
You start from water, oxygen, soil, seeds, potency, milk, butter, wheat, oven and more. In other words you need basic sciences like math, physics, chemistry, biology, arts, psychology and even poetry. This only proved to me that nothing is original. Everything is built on top of something that is existing.
Dictionaries say that originality means a state of being and I feel it is BS. Sorry. I think it is much more than that. When you know that nothing is original the level of reverence to everything that was handed to us from before is just mind blowing.
Our ability to remix aka be creative and make things novel and utilitarian is born from all these ingredients handed to us.
Originality is overrated.
🥂 to remix!