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Jon Douglas

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Creativity Means Being Unoriginal

Creativity can be seen in every area of our lives – in work, or in play, or in the mundane. Wherever you can find a way of doing things a bit better than what has been done before, you are being creative.

Perhaps one of the biggest interruptions to your creativity is worrying about being original when being creative. This can paralyze you. “Oh, that’s been done before” you may say to yourself. “I shouldn’t publish this because someone may find out I’m a phony”.

Here’s the thing though. When you’re being creative, there is no such thing as a mistake or being original. Majority of the internet is just recycled content. It’s just one unique message that is being cycled through different messengers.

The key to being creative is starting, even if what you’re creating is putting your own spin on a previous creation. This is a process known as iteration. It’s what creative people do all the time. They take something original, put their own spin on it, and now it becomes their own unique version of original.

When you first start creating in a serious fashion, you’re going to be unoriginal a lot. Hell, you may even imitate or copy previous creations and call them your own. This is normal. You’re trying to imitate and then iterate.

You’re a creator, a problem solver, and a leader who is making things better by finding a new way forward. You can think of creativity as an event that happens in your life every so often, but to find our own originality in our creativity means to be creative whether or not we’re in the mood.

You can follow other people’s recipes of their creativity as you may have done when first starting, but ultimately you know that your originality comes from following a different pattern. It is better to follow your own path, even if that path is imperfect, than to follow someone else’s path with perfection.

As you realize this, you’ll see that skill is not the same as talent. That having a good process will lead to good outcomes, and originality is unoriginal.

So start where you are so you can see and be seen. You can listen and you can be heard, and you can create what you were set out to create.

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