I created my first brand ten years ago — in the age of catchy phrases and blogger templates.

I was in University, supposed to be studying for my Psychology finals.

But of course I wasn’t. I spent my Uni time 40% drunk, 40% writing/blogging, and 20% studying. (The drunk percent was probably higher.)

So there I was, on Blogger because you didn’t have much choice. (Everyone in the writing and publishing world were on there. I think they still are.) But instead of being satisfied with the crappy default themes, I spent hours, days, and weeks looking for the “perfect” theme.

I finally found it and you can check it out on my old blog. *shudders*

As you can see, my last “brand name” isn’t so different from my new brand purpose. Polygamous Passionista was a word play at my multipassionate nature. I wanted to make everything a joke back then so there would be at least a little fun. People thought it was sexual and winked at me a lot.

(You know, that annoying winky emoji I can’t look at without scoffing.)

So anyway, back when I was an amateur blogger, I wrote about all kinds of things from time travel to American Idol to weird poetry and the basics of writing. It was trendy for people to call their brands something cutesy, so you would see a lot of crazy phrases turned into brand names — never mind the person who advised you to do it had her own name on top of her brand.

Is it me or are we just so thirsty for finding “the right way” that we become naive and follow anyone’s advice, missing the obvious?

My first brand name was Lyn Midnight Against the Odds, or LMAO abbreviated. I thought it was funny and it contained my artistic pseudonym. I’d read somewhere you needed one.

Another BIG thing back then were “blog themes”. If you were a blogger, you HAD to have daily themes. Monday Mantras, Tuesday Teasers, Wednesday Workouts, and I used alliteration because what else would a writer do? (That’s a good theme also!)

Back then, everyone followed the trends. We hopped on every train.

It’s amazing to me how willing we were to just follow other people’s rules. To jump on anything we saw and thought was neat. I don’t remember a single blogger who was doing anything I hadn’t seen before. It was all about blog hopping and those ridiculous blog award badges.

And not much has changed, has it? There are still too many fruity names and designs out there and there are still things that “everybody does” just different ones — like Periscope and webinars and info-products.

I don’t mean to be mean, I just want to ask myself and everyone around me — WHY DO WE FOLLOW INSTEAD OF LEAD?!

Why don’t we start movements instead of wondering what trend we should follow this week?

Last week, I posted a challenge in The Creative Rebels group and someone copied what I’d done instead of working on something of their own. It happens so often that I’m scared I’m surrounded by robots.

I’m also worried that we have forgotten how to be OURSELVES.

To remove ourselves from outside influence.

It’s normal to be influenced by everyone and everything around us, not to mention the exciting new trends we can’t wait to try, but these are all things someone started for us. Shouldn’t we be starting things?

Shouldn’t we at least try to be original?!

Remember, original is not having ideas from scratch, but tweaking what you know into something else, a REMIX. Austin Kleon talks about it here. He says you can trace any idea back to its roots thousands of years back.

It’s funny how much energy we spend trying to come up with original ideas. Then we’re out all this time and energy when we could have used it to tweak an existing idea or just borrow something, add some bells and whistles, and call it ours. Nobody will shout at you for using something everyone has used since the beginning of time. So why do you torture yourself trying to catch these ideas? It’s as if they’re these precious fireflies and you’ve spent your life learning how to catch them when other people are just creating their own fireflies in the meantime. While you catch 1 firefly per decade, some of your peers will produce hundreds of fireflies in that time.

Not every one will light up properly or remain lit, but so what?!

I think we have become too precious of our ideas and what we put out there and not too precious enough, too willing to follow.

Remember what James Altucher said, you must choose yourself.

So stop chasing these imaginary “perfect” fireflies and get remixing!

What do you think? Have we become complacent? What made us this way? And why are we so precious of our ideas? Can’t we just create?

Let’s start a conversation, rebels. :)

If you want to read more of my writing, just hop on over to my blog.

It’s perfect for creative rebels who want to do things by design, not default.