While driving to work yesterday, I was listening to a life coach speak on the topic of creativity. She made a comment that has stayed in my head as I pondered the significance of what she said. She was commenting on the difference between plagiarism and creativity.
She said “Plagiarism is when you steal from one person and creativity is when you steal from many. There are no new ideas. Everything has been said, there are just people who weren’t listening the first time”.
That is a very interesting concept, don’t you think? Afterall, we are all human beings wired basically the same way, expressing the same wants and needs. It stands to reason, that if I have had this thought, many others before me have had it as well, and it is not new.
In the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, 1:9 NIV;
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
That was close to 3,000 years ago. How much truer would it be today?
The life coach was using this example to encourage her listeners who want to create not to be intimated thinking we had nothing new or original to offer. We all share a collective base of experiences from those who went before us. , We can build on these experiences to create something unique. Based on our unique perspective or motivation, these collective experiences may be interpreted differently. If heard for the first time by someone it could then be interpreted as unique of different just by being who they are as an individual.
So then, where do totally original new ideas receive their inspiration from if there is nothing new under the sun? Where did the idea of electricity, telephone, automobiles or internet come from as examples of creative ideas of recent history. Perhaps these ideas were not created as much as they were discovered. These ideas that changed life as we know it were there all along. They weren’t so much “created” by a new thought as much as they were discovered by research and experiments shared up to that point.
Creativity therefore is to collect knowledge or examples from others and apply it to our endeavor to discover something unique or original.
Pretty cool, don’t you think? It certainly takes some of the pressure off without diluting the burst of creative insights of others. It’s possible for any of us, not just the geniuses or those who are highly intelligent among us, to be creative.
Ideas are discovered at the intersection of existing knowledge. I can come up with the idea of a time machine, but without the existing knowledge base to create it, it’s only an idea independent of the means to execute it.
Creativity is exploring the space of possibilities and drawing on the collective to execute.
