Originality

Not the kind where you just memorize stuff from a textbook and vomit it on a paper and you get an A. No, the kind that makes you think, “is there anything even left to say?”

To keep it blunt: yes. Everything ever has already been said, in the technical sense. The Library of Babel is a project where every combination of every english character or word is already there. It’s a great way to keep in mind that no, no thought you have ever had has been original. Nor will you ever have one. But true originality is more than just being the first one to do something.

If you really look at it, originality has never meant “never seen before.” It’s meant “never seen like this before.” The remix is not a fallback. It is
the art. It is the originality. Every painter learned by “stealing” from the masters. Every rapper starts with rapping over other’s beats. Even Shakespeare was adapting old stories from Italian literature.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the touchscreen phone, either. That already existed. There were companies doing it years before the iPhone. But none of them made it feel the way Apple did. Jobs didn’t win because he was first. He won because he made the idea click, made the idea feel like it was the first. He saw what the others missed, that design is part of the product, that function means nothing if it feels clunky, and that if you want people to care, you need to make something beautiful enough for them to fall in love with.

When people think that originality is about pulling something from the void that no one has laid eyes on, it’s more of a fantasy than a goal. Originality is more exciting than that. It’s something personal. What is truly original is the things that have influenced you: your experiences, your instincts, your timing. Your thoughts may have already been written, but the way you write them, the way you combine them, is something that no infinite library can replicate.

So if you’re waiting to feel fully original before you start creating, you’ll be sitting in the waiting room forever. Just start anyway. Make something that feels like you. Not because no one’s ever said it before, but because no one’s ever said it like this.

And if someone else has already done it, even better. That just means you’re standing in the right room. Now say it again: louder and weirder.

Because the goal was never to be the first.
It was to be the one that made it click.