0:00 it's all been done before everything's been written how can I express my creativity if it's already been done by someone else someone more talented someone cleverer and maybe luckier this is the pain I had when I started writing but this struggle for originality is not just the writers it belongs to anybody who wants that creative success whether they're a painter a composer or a programmer you want to stand out you want your work to actually matter and you want to be original there's this platform called substack where you probably are familiar with it you can share your writing and people can read it on the internet and I remember every time I read through it I would finish that article feeling almost disappointed in myself it was great writing don't get
0:46 me wrong but most of all it surprised me it wasn't the run-of-the-mill copypaste stuff that you see just spammed on every blog almost the chat GPT style writing this was real original and unique thinking it was insightful it's the type of ideas that wake you up from your sleep and make you like sit up straight and actually pay attention to what you're reading it's that powerful and I was sad because it made me reflect on my own writing and to be honest I was sick and tired of writing the same old repetitive boring junk and I wanted to be more like these writers and there was that huge divide between me and them and I was wondering how can you think like them how can you bridge that Gap and start producing ing something that is
1:31 different from the rest now since then I have practiced writing and I have managed to actually get it out into the world now I'm still young and very inexperienced at this craft so I don't really know anything either but what I have learned is that this originality is not down to Natural Talent or or luck it can be engineered and you can steer yourself towards it in an organic way and I know that because ever since I applied some of these principles which you're about to see I become an idea machine they just come effortlessly and for every one thing I write about 10 more come and now I'm almost spoiled because there's too much to choose from and that becomes the new challenge it's Suffering From Success I guess now don't get me wrong you are the judge of
2:18 whether those ideas are good or not but I mean they fill me with the excitement to sit down and write something or to record a video and to me that's a good sign of originality and some fresh thinking that isn't the same old boring stuff so here I want to talk about some of the tips and methods that have allowed me to think originally in a natural way with none of the chat GPT idea generators or you know straight up plagiarism now just a quick disclaimer I do approach this sort of from a writer's perspective but the ideas here can apply to any creative field they're very general and versatile and you can apply them to whatever you do whether it's painting or coding anything so no matter who you are and what you do I think
3:03 they'll serve you well how do you become a clone of everyone else an NPC an Android well there's many ways but one is to just consume the same stuff as them I mean after all you are what you eat as they say and if you consume overprocessed lowquality food you will start to feel it it will sink your mood it will sap your energy and you'll just wake up in a state of lethargy with no energy to fight the day well if you spin it on the other hand if you eat if you respect your body with you know good Whole Foods nice nutritious meals you'll feel it and you will have that that power and that energy to at least face the day with more strength to begin with
3:48 and what's even better is that gives you the foundation for a positive spiral upwards whereas in the other case you were setting yourself up for failure it's exactly the same with everything you want watch read and listen to you are what you consume most if not all of your ideas don't just materialize out of thin air they have to come from somewhere and that will usually be your experiences your prejudices and most of all the ideas you take in from the outside world if you binge a bunch of Jordan petson lectures then you'll start to talk like him and I know that because ever since I discovered him I've said the word meaning 100 times more of often than I did before and you know it's the same in everyday life if you suddenly
4:35 move to the hood for some reason you will start to use their slang and to behave and to talk like them and if you consume all of those trendy podcasts you see everywhere then you will start to think like them and that will be the discussion in your head because that's all that's coming in that's why when you go on the self-improvement side of YouTube everyone is saying the same crap over and over again and it's fatiguing and I think because it's created this Echo chamber of input and input and input where it just recycles infinitely the solution is quite simple and luckily for you actually makes life a bit more fun and all it involves is reading widely and uniquely you won't think differently and if you consume the same boring old 50
5:22 self-help books as everyone else if your next choice a book is always dictated by someone on the internet like me then you may not get a chance to explore books yourself and to find the more Niche lesser known ones that still have a lot of great wisdom inside that are kind of under the radar swept under the rug that sort of thing in a sense your thoughts are the sum of your bookshelf and if your bookshelf is different from the next person's then you will think originally and your mind will reflect that Tim deos who makes some really great videos on here summ this idea up perfectly I love this he said said that you can only cook with what's in the fridge if you stock this so-called fridge with ingredients that are fresh and diverse and healthy then your
6:09 thoughts will reflect that and they will be more interesting and be given the building blocks to flourish and to grow by the way Tim makes some great videos on reading in general so I'll link to his channel below I think you'd like him I'm going to betray you here by backtracking completely if you want more original thoughts then stop consuming stuff well how does that make sense I mean the last point was to consume fresh ideas and now I'm telling you to slow down that flow of information why would you ever want to do that well it is true that you have to consume before you create but at the same time it's easy to take that too far and sometimes we ought to turn off the tap a bit and slow down that consumption and if you go to the gym you will know exactly what I mean by
6:55 this if you bang out an intense 3-hour full body work out 7 days a week then it's clear to me you don't know what you're doing and you're kind of a beginner in the gym you soon realize that that is not sustainable for more than a week your muscles and Joints don't have the time to properly recover in that case in between sessions and you're just constantly torturing them eventually exposing yourself to injury when you do make a sensible routine and you give your body the time to rest then you will see progress because muscle growth doesn't happen during the exercise it happens when you're not exercising afterwards especially during sleep your thoughts follow a similar pattern if your mind is constantly taking in information from a podcast a video a book then it never gets a chance
7:43 to rest and to process that information I mean of course the flood of content gives you a lot of building material to work with but if you never stop and actually let your mind do something with that material it will amount to very little the good news is it's easy to let your thoughts come naturally you sit there and you do nothing that's it the modern Market has trained you and I to be like rats in a lab hooked up to this dopamine machine that is constantly injecting pleasure into our veins and we build a Reliance on it so we always have to keep consuming more and more to feel barely alive and what that does is it Blocks Your Mind from being free to just think for it to wand for it to simmer with the
8:28 thoughts you have have that doesn't happen anymore if that sounds unusual to you try going for a walk without music and you will see just how powerful some silence can be because the thoughts rush in like crazy and of course you don't have to go for a walk you can Lounge in the sun you can chill on a on the sofa or couch sorry you can do whatever you want but the point is to have some room to just do nothing just to think just to rest just to be with yourself however I do recommend a nice walk and it's not just me who's preaching it now I'm appealing to Authority here hope you forgive me for that but one of History's Greatest thinkers said that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking so I'm going to take his word for it now obviously you'll want to capture a lot of these ideas because the thoughts will come to you and that's
9:15 Liquid Gold well not liquid immaterial intellectual intellectual gold and you want to keep it with you of course now in the past I used to get my phone out I'd fiddle with the brightness cuz I can't see the screen and I'd record a voice message to myself in the recorder app because surely surely My Future Self has all the patience in the world to sit down listen to my selft talk and then make a transcription of it and then organize that to my obsidian notes oh definitely that's definitely happening well look it's wishful thinking and I now have a graveyard of all these random voice notes that I never got around to sorting out but with audio notes who are sponsoring this video that irritation is replaced by a seamless flow of ideas let's say I'm
10:02 walking home and out of the blue a great idea pops into my head maybe for a piece of future writing I can go to their WhatsApp integrated bot send it a voice message explaining my idea and automatically it processes that audio and turns it into text and here's the best part which I think is genius you come home and that voice message transcription is already on your computer as both a direct transcript and the nice neat AI summary which is important cuz I tend to ramble in my voice messages from there it's super easy for me to copy and paste it to wherever I need and I don't have to go through the boring process of hearing myself waffle on and then transcribing it manually it's so convenient it's become a subconscious almost invisible
10:48 part of my everyday life I use it whenever I go on a walk it's also nice to have open as you work maybe in a second tab maybe you don't have the time to write down an idea and you don't interrupt to the flow so instead you hit record tell audio notes your idea and it handles all of the writing for you without interrupting you you can even adjust the style of transcription it does for you depending on your exact scenario it could be an exact transcript it could be an email to someone or even an audio journal entry within the app you can edit you can tag you can organize your notes to keep them in check and if you ever need to download the audio files that's also an option there's there also this neat magic chat feature which lets you pull answers from your bank of notes whenever you ask it a
11:34 question almost like a virtual assistant that helps you look through your ideas also in about a month's time it's going to be available as an app one that you can use offline and I think that's just a great step forward and it has a lot of potential there audio notes is a breath of fresh air in notet taking software so if you want to change how you capture ideas then click the link in the description to get started Jack London the charismatic writer Superstar has a famous saying that says you can't wait for inspiration you have to go after it with a club too many creative people and I mean talented people will run into this mental brick wall because they believe that miraculously new ideas will just show up at the door just like that even if you make time to think and to read widely you may still find yourself
12:21 with a blank canvas in front of you with nothing to build off I think a big reason for that is we get stuck in a repetitive routine now I'm still young I'm not really talking from experience here but from what I've heard life gets a bit more mellow as you get older things start to kind of dry out a bit things get calmer things get more settled it's not all crazy fun in games anymore at least not as often and we tend to lose that spark for the more unique experiences the type that we sit around on fire and talk about Howell even my daily routine is kind of mundane I write I edit I do my gym not much there and I'm not saying this to discredit that St lifestyle but it's also at the same time not a crazy
13:06 adventure that you see on Instagram or other social media but there's also a problem because you have to ask yourself how can I write about emotions let's say if I have never experienced them myself how can you sing about love if you haven't been through its ups and downs yourself how can you create something amazing if you have not yet lived through something amazing and it all boils down to the kind of ugly truth that says how can we expect inspiration if we never put any effort in to go and find it now I forgot where this next idea was from but it really stuck with me I think it was from the creative act by Rick Rubin don't quote me on that but I think it was the case and the question was why are so many musicians artists and writers such deeply troubled people
13:54 it's pretty common to see them struggling with drug abuse with Mental Health crisis season all of this other horrible emotional burden that we then read about in the history books or even the news of today one Theory said that their creativity did not cause their emotional trouble however it was an outlet for them to express that to express those disturbing emotions they suffered inside they had this huge emotional burden and the only way they could let that out into the world was through song through writing through painting and we see that maybe misinterpret it as a result of being creative so their creativity wasn't the cause of their problem but not the result either rather it simply revealed their life experiences and gave
14:41 us a window into it now I know it's not the most fun example but luckily it works both ways it can be a happy thing and the point is to you know say if you want original and exciting thoughts and ideas you have to get out into the world and make some stories happen and to create that experience to write about to sing about to paint about you have to talk to people from different walks of life you have to do stuff that's intimidating and overall look set your sights high and build something greater than yourself that will give you that tail to tell you you don't have to climb Everest and you shouldn't anyway cuz that's stupid but the point is to live life with intention and to live with an eye for the details that create stories and that means it doesn't have to be flashy you could go and get a coffee and
15:28 that is the subject of your next piece of writing and it could be brilliant but you can only do that if you appreciate the moment and let the everyday stories speak to you and you need an eye for obviously spotting those in the past I said no to too many people too often I denied trips I said no to new experiences and I stayed in for too many Friday evenings more than I'd like to admit I mean not all of them are great sure fine but I regret all of this most of the time I said no because I was either lazy or too anxious for what could happen and that is why I regret it so much but now when these same offers show up I can't say no because if I do I'm throwing away precious memories and
16:14 some valuable life experiences plus we all need some law you know Dad law is a thing where did you think they got that from they said yes to things they took risks they did stupid things sometimes but that gave them stories to tell stories we love to hear nowadays so before you sit down to create something live first get out into the world and experience what it has to offer and then the ideas will fly in effortlessly when you struggle to think originally you feel inadequate and that feeling causes you then to stop creating it's easy for that to become a destructive Loop which pulls you away from the craft completely so how can you avoid this self-defeating mindset the answer is almost painfully obvious but you can never understand that unless you take the first step towards it
16:59 just start creating the very Act of Creation inspires more ideas it's easy to feel like you have to have a whole database of ideas before you sit down to produce something that's what I felt in writing I thought I had to know what I was going to write about tomorrow the next week the next month all before I even produced anything I was so afraid of running out of ideas that that fear just paralyzed me however once I got the confidence to just start and stop being dumb like that I realized as I wrotes more ideas just came naturally with every paragraph with every page something new would be inspired the topic I was writing about gave me a natural bridging point to other interesting things which I may never have seen otherwise writing is now a regular habit of mine and I never ever
17:46 worry about running out of ideas because they just keep coming there's too many to choose from and that's the new problem now so for whatever creative Pursuit you have your next idea might be at the end of a practice session so just start and see where it takes you you know what's ironic we've been talking about the idea of original for the whole video and yet it doesn't really exist there's no such thing as original so much human history has passed that any seemingly new idea is probably just rehashed from the past how many Romeo and Juliet have there been how many paintings of the same old landscape how many tragic Heroes have there been what that's original it sounds depressing at first until realize that you can create something unique even if the heart of it
18:32 is similar to something else you can call tolken the father of fantasy I mean I think he's the big dog at the top of the food chain but that doesn't mean everybody else after him was an unoriginal clone Skyrim Game of Thrones The Witcher they all have elements of token's World building and yet they are unique and respected pieces of work in their own right but why is that what makes them unique and how can you add that sprinkler originality to your own writing well you change things no I mean yeah that's it and not just one or two things but the fabric of the whole plot the whole story the whole subject maybe the setting is different or the magic system or the world history and of course the story will be different the characters will be different all of
19:18 these elements change and you see this remixing everywhere many novelists don't bother writing just another fantasy because it's been done so many times and you are fighting such an uphill battle against you know the Legends like tolken like Game of Thrones as sad as it is to say and instead they don't bother fighting but they choose a more specific topic they might take another angle to it they might write a dystopian fantasy a techn fantasy or some more weird and wacky wonderful thing that stands out from the rest much more easily they mix many unoriginal things to create something original and you see that everywhere in art but how can you take control of this mixing and you know not leave it up to Blind chance well one of
20:03 my favorite ways to do it is to take your interests and just overlap them this means you combine elements from different things that you are passionate about in that case it's easy for you to stay motivated because you're working with stuff you love and that's great in itself but even better you have a unique set of interests that nobody else shares and to some degree it defines you it defines who you are and that means that nobody can steal that uniqueness from you and it becomes the basis of of course original thinking original art original writing all of that stuff for example you might love basketball and cinematography so you explore passion that combines those two maybe you become great at filming basketball matches you
20:49 make edits of it you do promos all this good stuff or maybe you love psychology and personal finance so you find a cool and clever way to blend those two topics and approach the same two subjects from a different fresh angle the most obvious example I can claim is this channel I like to make videos I like to write so I talk about writing through video it's that simple and because I read slightly different books and have a few unique hobbies and experiences it reflects in how the points are delivered and the same is true for you nobody can copy who you are so try and see if you can connect the things you love in a way that makes your creation unique and original to you and of course have fun cuz that's what it's all about now I know I'm missing a lot
21:36 here so if you have any insights on approaching original thinking I would love to hear them my email is open my the comments are open of course I read and respond to everything through email but it does take a while so my apologies are there but you know feel free to send me anything I also forgot to mention my newsletter in this video so this Shameless plug will have to wait for the end I have a newsletter links down below I think you'll like it it's Unique insights on Reading Writing learning and building a happy creative life there's no spam there's no pay wall none of that I think you like it so do sign up to that and of course thank you so much for watching
