Although imitation is often said to be the “sincerest form of flattery,” I would argue it is in fact the root of all creativity. The tangible and valuable substance of all human output, including anything considered original, is always in a delicate balance of assimilation with what has been done before. Therefore, true originality, in the sense that a creative ego normally tends to view it, is a myth. In that sense, everything I have ever created, both artistically and in every other embodiment, is actually a form of imitation.
Ideas cause ideas; they cross-pollinate, combine, evolve, recombine, and segregate into what we perceive as new content. The information we gather, or where we place our attention, is ultimately what influences our new ideas, or our intentions. Even the smallest, seemingly insignificant interactions and experiences, slowly accumulate over the course of our lifetime, leading to insights that determine all of our choices. This is why ideas often seem to have a way of sneaking up on us. We absorb and cull information, pool it into a mental repository where it settles, until the right moment where it connects with another idea and a combination synthesizes. This is the root of all perceived originality.
The very essence of this essay, that creativity and inspiration can only be achieved by combining past resources, can itself be attributed to countless musings and quotations from prolific and successful creators of the past expressing their thoughts on the myth of originality. Salvador Dali expressed quite succinctly that “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” There is a famous story about Picasso sketching a portrait of a woman in five minutes; when he is finished, he says that it will cost her five-thousand dollars. The woman yells, “but it took you only five minutes!” Picasso replies, “No, Madam, it took me all my life.” It is by no accident that, historically, this sentiment has been repeated again and again by humanity's greatest minds across all disciplines. That knowledge alone is potent fuel for inspiration.
Although the spreading power of concepts is no new thing – undoubtedly older than humanity itself – the internet era has certainly made it easier to facilitate the osmosis of ideas that is the basis of creativity, as evidenced by the increased propagation of “viral” memes and other cultural phenomena. This makes it increasingly more difficult to attribute credit to a specific creative influence, as the sheer volume of input experienced by an average person in the modern world is almost immeasurable. With a greater knowledge pool, the potential for creative combinations of that information increases.
Therefore, the more one knows about a subject, the more creative they can be. Being informed across many diverse disciplines provides even greater potential for creativity. Einstein was famous for physics, but he also was known for playing the piano and violin in his breaks; he and his wife strongly attributed these musical interludes to helping with his theories and physics breakthroughs.
Despite the fact that creativity and perceived originality are interdependently rooted in networked knowledge, many people still tend to downplay the value of connecting the dots from a reservoir of absorbed ideas. The process is often described using words such as imitation (at best) or plagiarism (at worst). Artists often feel guilt or resistance to the concept that their creations are based on or borrowed from others' ideas. Mark Twain mocked this criticism as it applied to writing and acknowledged the true root of creativity, saying, “As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!” Perhaps the struggle with this idea comes from the negative connotations surrounding the matter of plagiarism and the sensitivity of being associated with theft. More than that, though, I believe the root of this resistance stems from a fear of unoriginality, harking back to our subconscious need to leave an individual mark on the world, our legacy, and to ultimately have a purpose for existing. For if nothing is original, then who are we as individuals? The desire to answer this question seems to be at the root of all expression.
Original thought is balanced and intwined with what has been done before. Originality is, then, in essence, what we choose to cull and connect from what we perceive. My own personal creativity stems from the sum of all my influences, imitations, interactions, and insights, all curated and channeled into the body of my work and self-expression. The process of discovering information itself – what we choose to place our attention on – becomes what defines our creativity. Therefore, though imitation can often be seen as the sincerest form of flattery – uncreative at its best and plagiarism at its worst – in a sense imitation is rather the most sincere form of creative ideation.
Ideas cause ideas; they cross-pollinate, combine, evolve, recombine, and segregate into what we perceive as new content. The information we gather, or where we place our attention, is ultimately what influences our new ideas, or our intentions. Even the smallest, seemingly insignificant interactions and experiences, slowly accumulate over the course of our lifetime, leading to insights that determine all of our choices. This is why ideas often seem to have a way of sneaking up on us. We absorb and cull information, pool it into a mental repository where it settles, until the right moment where it connects with another idea and a combination synthesizes. This is the root of all perceived originality.
The very essence of this essay, that creativity and inspiration can only be achieved by combining past resources, can itself be attributed to countless musings and quotations from prolific and successful creators of the past expressing their thoughts on the myth of originality. Salvador Dali expressed quite succinctly that “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” There is a famous story about Picasso sketching a portrait of a woman in five minutes; when he is finished, he says that it will cost her five-thousand dollars. The woman yells, “but it took you only five minutes!” Picasso replies, “No, Madam, it took me all my life.” It is by no accident that, historically, this sentiment has been repeated again and again by humanity's greatest minds across all disciplines. That knowledge alone is potent fuel for inspiration.
Although the spreading power of concepts is no new thing – undoubtedly older than humanity itself – the internet era has certainly made it easier to facilitate the osmosis of ideas that is the basis of creativity, as evidenced by the increased propagation of “viral” memes and other cultural phenomena. This makes it increasingly more difficult to attribute credit to a specific creative influence, as the sheer volume of input experienced by an average person in the modern world is almost immeasurable. With a greater knowledge pool, the potential for creative combinations of that information increases.
Therefore, the more one knows about a subject, the more creative they can be. Being informed across many diverse disciplines provides even greater potential for creativity. Einstein was famous for physics, but he also was known for playing the piano and violin in his breaks; he and his wife strongly attributed these musical interludes to helping with his theories and physics breakthroughs.
Despite the fact that creativity and perceived originality are interdependently rooted in networked knowledge, many people still tend to downplay the value of connecting the dots from a reservoir of absorbed ideas. The process is often described using words such as imitation (at best) or plagiarism (at worst). Artists often feel guilt or resistance to the concept that their creations are based on or borrowed from others' ideas. Mark Twain mocked this criticism as it applied to writing and acknowledged the true root of creativity, saying, “As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!” Perhaps the struggle with this idea comes from the negative connotations surrounding the matter of plagiarism and the sensitivity of being associated with theft. More than that, though, I believe the root of this resistance stems from a fear of unoriginality, harking back to our subconscious need to leave an individual mark on the world, our legacy, and to ultimately have a purpose for existing. For if nothing is original, then who are we as individuals? The desire to answer this question seems to be at the root of all expression.
Original thought is balanced and intwined with what has been done before. Originality is, then, in essence, what we choose to cull and connect from what we perceive. My own personal creativity stems from the sum of all my influences, imitations, interactions, and insights, all curated and channeled into the body of my work and self-expression. The process of discovering information itself – what we choose to place our attention on – becomes what defines our creativity. Therefore, though imitation can often be seen as the sincerest form of flattery – uncreative at its best and plagiarism at its worst – in a sense imitation is rather the most sincere form of creative ideation.
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