The Spark Factory: Creativity Saboteur – Originality, and Why it Doesn’t Matter |

The Spark Factory: Creativity Saboteur – Originality, and Why it Doesn’t Matter

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Susan Bishop

I’m super excited about being on WomanTalk Live this coming Saturday night. First, I love being with host Ann Quasman anytime and, second, I love being the WomanTalk Live Creativity Expert and coming up with new topics around that theme.

So, when Ann sent me my show date for 2013, I started brainstorming what my topic would be (or, I should say, as soon as the show date got close enough to be scary, I started brainstorming what my topic would be).

Anyway, I kept coming back to this idea of a “different” way of approaching New Year’s Resolutions. I thought about the questions I always ask my coaching clients at the start of a new year and, from there, I came up with my topic for this Saturday night:

Your Big, Bold, Bad-Ass Year:
5 Questions for Making 2013
Your Most Creative Year Ever

I LOVE this topic. The questions are fun, provocative and powerful – and I’ve used them (or questions like them) for the past eight to ten years as a way to step more fully into what I want for myself in the new year, and also as a reminder to practice what I want to work on for the next 365 days.

Then, I started to select the five questions I would use for the radio show. And this is when my GREAT idea for my topic almost flat-lined.

While mulling over what the final couple of questions would be, I opened an email from a client that just happened to contain – you guessed it – a link to another creativity-forwarding company that just happened to have asked five thought leaders to each share their most powerful question for the start of a new year.

Shoot.

From that moment on – up until literally RIGHT NOW – it seems like everywhere I turn someone is publishing great, provocative, fun questions for people to ponder at the start of the New Year.

I mean there are question-related articles and podcasts and social media posts EVERYWHERE.

I realized that even though creativity was my personal slant on the types of questions I was developing for the WomanTalk Live radio show, the reality was that my questions had an awful lot in common with all the other questions I was finding.

So, I did what my gut told me I should do: I MOVED FORWARD WITH MY TOPIC AND QUESTIONS ANYWAY.

I did not get discouraged. I did not rethink my plan. I didn’t worry about making my questions different. Instead, I simply concentrated on making them what I wanted them to be.

What I learned a long time ago, and what I’ve noticed over and over again, both as a creative professional and as a human being with a passion for creating, is that originality is very rare.

No matter what you want to create, there will likely be someone or multiple someones who have already created your idea – or something very similar. Even more, once you do get your idea, it’s likely that, all of sudden, you’ll become aware of every single one of them. Those other similar (or even exactly the same) ideas will come out of the woodwork to haunt you.

But here’s what I truly believe – and why I did not let my topic for Saturday’s show flat-line:

Originality is overrated.

No one will ever deliver the message and/or creation the way you will.

There are people in the world who will only come in contact with the message and/or creation through your version of it – or will only be able to “get” your version of it.

And, in this sense, originality is ALWAYS true about your creations. They are original because they came from you and have your essence within them.

I’ve had so many clients who, once sparked by their big ideas, become immediately disheartened to learn they’re not original. Their first instinct is to stop and think up something else.

I tell them exactly what I shared above and they get it. They also get that even if they do think up something else, it’s more than like the new idea will already exist, too.

In fact, I’ve never presented a thought about navigating a saboteur (in this case, a voice that says something lie: If my idea is not original, I shouldn’t pursue it.) that is almost always easily uploaded and integrated by my clients – and fast.

I think this fact speaks to the idea that we all sort of know how hard it is to be original; that we realize that all of our ideas ARE original at their core, simply because they came from us; that we recognize we are cheating ourselves and the world to hold back a great idea just because somebody else finished their version of our idea first; and, finally, that we understand innately that we had the idea FOR A REASON (and we’ll actually be talking about that, specifically, next week).

I hope all of you will join Ann and I Saturday night at 6pm EST for the show. You can listen live online at WCBM or on 680AM in Baltimore. We may even share some of our own answers to the five questions I’ll be suggesting for super creative 2013. Of course, our answers definitely won’t be original.

To striving to be YOUR best rather than DIFFERENT,

Susan B.

Unlocked Box – coaching for risk-takers, box-breakers and wannabe’s.