How to Train Your Mind to Think Original
Forget about “being disruptive” and keep this in mind instead.
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I grew up in the 90s, so imagine my disappointment when I found out trading cards and collectibles were not a unique, original trend only we got to enjoy.
A confectionery company was putting Panini NBA cards and Pokemon Tazos to shame almost a century earlier. Their collectibles were way cooler: hand-drawn illustrations predicting what living in the 2000s would be like. Now that is worth a wave of “1900s nostalgia” (if most of the target market weren’t dead, but that’s not the point).
Spoiler alert: None of the illustrations predicted anything correctly. I’ll show you more below: there’s no trace of Coldplay dominating the charts with their first album, no clue of our obsession with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston (Brad and Jen, for the tabloid connoisseurs), or any of the 2000s major moments.
So, can we learn to be original or not?
It certainly doesn’t feel like we are original at all
In fact, don’t even google “greatest innovations of the 21st Century.” It’s heartbreakingly disappointing.
I’ll save you the scroll of shame and give you a highlight reel.
We put the word “smart” next to some already-existing devices (something my washing machine 100% didn’t need), we made a hologram of 2Pac (cashing on that 90s nostalgia), we created Artificial Intelligence (but did we? Did we, though?) and some websites will even mention the selfie stick and the fidget spinner.
Seriously, have we lost our mojo?
Every innovation now looks like a recycled rip-off of something we already knew about. Reusable rockets? Self-driving cars? Everything’s an update, and I hate updates, especially when I click on postpone and my PC installs them anyway.
But that’s actually how innovations work!
We share much more in common with the people of 1900 than we think.
Sure, our world, compared with what they imagined it would be, is an impossibly sped up, hyper-connected, cyberpunk society — although with a disappointing lack of personal-use flying vehicles, if I may add.
They were trapped in their time. And so are we.
But look at those illustrations closely. They are trying to leap one hundred years into the future, and the scenes look… quite old, actually. And now look at our own rip-off innovations. Don’t they look too familiar with what we already have?
We are riffing on cars and rockets because that’s what we know. They were riffing on trains and ships for the same reason.
It seems our imagination can’t escape what’s familiar to us
People of the 1900s could only think of variations of what they already knew. They couldn’t imagine a short skirt, a skater, a particle accelerator. They were trapped in their time.
And so are we.
But if we can’t be original past what we know, how come life went from the hot pond of the primordial soup, with only a handful of elements and a can-do attitude, to triggering nuclear chain reactions in atomic bombs and developing an unhealthy obsession with funny cat videos?
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman came up with an interesting concept that explains why. The adjacent possible.
To understand how it works, let’s go back to the hot pond
The adjacent possible represents the range of new things (be that elements, materials, or TikTok trends) that we can create by combining what we already have.
The primordial soup, for example — which might not have been a pond, but a hydrothermal vent — had only a handful of elements floating around. Now, you can combine hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen to make formaldehyde, but you can’t combine them to make a Chevrolet.
Not that the Chevrolet is an impossible invention (unless it turns into Bumblebee in Transformers) but that it was beyond the frontier of the adjacent possible at that point in time.
The beauty of this is that the frontier expands with each combination. So the elements combine into amino acids, amino acids form polymers, which combine into proteins — and the chain keeps going: cells, multi-cellular life, plants, fish, terrestrial animals, primates, homo sapiens, engineering, combustion engines, Chevrolets.
So originality is not about inventing something “totally new and unheard of”
I’m sorry, but the word “revolutionary” is mostly hype.
When Steve Jobs got on stage in 2007 to introduce the first iPhone, he said, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” One hopeful attendee could’ve thought, “Okay, finally, telepathic communication systems. About time.”
But then Steve said this: “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices, this is one device.”
So, three things everyone already knew about. But this time, together.
Was it revolutionary?
Hell yes, it was! But not because it was something beyond everyone’s imagination. It was revolutionary because it expanded the adjacent possible in a helpful way.
And that’s what originality is all about
Forget the hype, forget “being disruptive” or “paradigm-shifting.” Originality is all about making a single, useful step forward.
Who would’ve thought that a city-wide roof to protect us from the rain was much less practical than having satellites literally orbiting the Earth, forecasting the weather from space, and then leaving it up to us to decide whether to take the umbrella?
But that’s the beauty of exploring the adjacent possible: we can guess, but we don’t have the slightest idea of what’s going to work. The trick is to spend time there, in the frontier, trying out combinations.
And who knows? Perhaps in a hundred years, when the air is so polluted with cow farts it rains radioactive methane, we make that city-wide roof idea work. How exciting is the future?
