At a silent retreat I went to, one of the teachers said something that resonated deeply with me: “all wisdom is plagiarized, only our ignorance is original.” I would say his name, but he didn’t take credit for it, saying that he heard it from one of his teachers. And I have no idea who that was. And who knows where that person heard it from. Which kind of proves the quote.
Recently on a podcast, I heard “Gary Vee” say, (and I paraphrase), “I think there are two ways to have the tallest building in town, one being to tear other people’s buildings down and the other to build theirs up.” This is a nice metaphor about focusing on one’s own progress instead of feeling fearful / resentful about others’ success. As soon as he said it, I distinctly remembered hearing it years ago from Tony Robbins, in some book or interview. But what is interesting to me is how, the first time I heard the metaphor, it never occurred to me that Tony Robbins may have been recycling it. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But my implicit assumption was that it was original, just because it was the first time I heard it. How many times do we make this error? I wonder if it is virtually every time, because ideas and principles are understood and lived far more times than they are articulated. The number of times a good idea has been articulated are myriad, and the better the idea, the more times it has been retold. Or, as a graph:
Wisdom has surely “gone viral” long before that term … went viral. And the number of times an idea can be articulated for the first time? Well, once, right? Therefore, the odds of something as fundamental as, focus on your own success, compared to something as ubiquitous as a building, strikes me as exceedingly slim.
Ideas also evolve convergently, like the wings of bees and birds of whose evolution had nothing to do with one another besides the common benefit of flight. Perhaps several, or even hundreds, or thousands of people associated success with creating a building, and envy with destroying another person’s building. We have had buildings, people, envy, and success, for a long time. But even if we think that we combined these constructs together in a unique way for the first time without help, there’s no way of knowing that for sure, because of how fallible human memory is. I am certain that I have had ideas that felt very original to me, but were in fact remarkably similar to or even identical to ideas that I heard along the way at some point in my childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. These could have been conversations that 8-year-old me heard subconsciously between adults around me as I played with my marble slides, or something that people in the bus seat behind me I heard when I was in college. Then five years later, free-associating during a particularly relaxing moment, I impress myself with that same thought and give myself credit. Therapists sometimes muse about how a client will come back after several weeks and tell us about an epiphany they had that sounds identical to something we told me during a recent previous session, without the client even remembering us saying it. Incidentally, I’m sure that if the roles were reversed, the therapists (as clients) would do the exact same thing. Perhaps we have an originality bias that leads us to forget where we heard things and think of them as our own. One could probably have a good time speculating about the evolutionary advantages of such as glitch, but I won’t go there for now.
We often think of originality in black-white terms. Social and legal conventions like patents and copyright laws encourage this – something is either taken or it isn’t. And while I’m agnostic for now around the amount of territorial disputes we need to have over idea originality, what I do think is that we should be aware that originality is, at the very least, on a continuum. And it may be that, the more complex a creation is, the more likely it to be original. The more parts we combine, the more relationships between those parts, the more likely it will be new, to say nothing of quality. And I’m not sure if wisdom is really all that complex.
I find this idea (surely thought of countless times before by other humans) liberating because it relieves me of the pressure of everything I create needing to be “original” or “special”. When I was 10 and learning watercolor painting, I didn’t stress out because I was painting Tahoe landscapes with the same mountain / lake / tree-with-one-big-branch scene. I just enjoyed painting and watching each one get a little better. I didn’t worry about the fact that landscape painting wasn’t new, or how the quality of my landscapes compared to that of others. In other words, I was focusing on my own paintings instead of tearing up other people’s paintings. Maybe I heard this idea from someone who heard it from someone else who thought of it independently along with thousands of other long-deceased homo-sapiens. And maybe not. The point is, who cares? It is a useful metaphor. And what sense does it make to take credit for something that most likely doesn’t belong to anyone?