Marc @FreeMarketsFan: Do u believe you, or anyone, can ever have a truly original thought or is everything simply a derivative off past ideas/thoughts?
ANSWER:
What are you thinking about the most today? I know what I will be thinking about. Crap. Mindless chatter. He hates me. I like her. She thinks I’m stupid. They like me. They hate me. They are doing wrong to me. Wrong things are being done to me. Stop the wrong things from happening. Trees. More wrong things are happening to me. And so on, On and on and on. A brain is boring. Brains were made to find food and have sex. We’ve done it well enough to survive 100,000 years and we probably have at least 20 to 50 more years in us, if not much more.
So no, there are no original thoughts. They are all derivatives of the first thoughts: more food. More sex.
But we got creative about how to get food and sex. We started putting two and two together. Ideas started to mate (hat tip to “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley) and come up with new ideas. Generations of ideas evolve very fast. Much faster than human generations.
This is why it’s so important to develop the idea muscle. You must come up with thousands and thousands of ideas to give you a basic population of ideas so they can mate and come up with new ones, so that new generations can develop quickly, so that no matter what ideas are thrown at you, the idea muscle will riff instantly so you can became an idea machine and develop new ones that spawn off of the old.
Otherwise you will be casting about for the original idea that will never come. A fisherman without his net.
Exercise: come up with 10 ideas today. Then throw away the list. Come up with ten ideas tomorrow. And so on. I’ve written before: but in six months your life will be completely changed as a result.