Do you find yourself confused as to what your main direction in life is? Do you find yourself exploring This and then That and then berating yourself because you reckon you should have spent that time working on One Major Purpose instead of allowing yourself to get distracted?
Well, if so, RELAX!
Maybe you aren’t wasting time at all!
Maybe – just maybe – you are in the process of creating something amazing and highly original by combining different concepts and fields into One New Thing – a new category even!
READ
Can’t see how this applies to you and your disparate interests? Well, then maybe you need to explore this concept a bit more. Some good books to read are “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin, “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Kim and R. Mauborgne and “The Medici Effect” by Frans Johansson. All great books about the importance and methods of creating extraordinarily original offerings.
DRAW
Another awesome method of seeing where the connections lie is mind-mapping. If you are such a tech-head that you need to, you can find software to help with this, but personally I prefer a pen and the back of an envelope – this way I just bang out the ideas in my head, explore the connections, and move on to doing some real work. I don’t recommend spending hours fluffing about with this kind of thing, because it’s not real work, but a quick mind-mapping sessions can certainly help when inspiration strikes – or when it doesn’t.
Fly in the Face of Convention
This concept of combining seemingly unrelated fields of endeavor into a new original category or offering can be difficult for others to understand if you try and spell it out to them as a hypothetical theory. For example, my (always evolving) offering involves combining original music, humour, writing, personal development and entrepreneurship into my One Thing, but unless it serves a purpose (such as to illustrate my point), I don’t try to get people to understand this ambitious plan. Why? Because …
A) I don’t need the let-down when people don’t get it (because it sounds ridiculous to them) and tell me I’m crazy.I know I’m crazy anyway – and I don’t give a fuck! I like it!
B) I don’t fully understand my One New Thing yet myself! It’s an ever-evolving exploration of Self, through which I hope to help others to realize their own True Nature and/or simply to enjoy living more.
C) Because you don’t have to be able to explain it as a theory. It’s just not necessary!
Have a look around and you will find that truly original Creators are Do-ers and tend to either not be very self-analytical, or if they are, they keep this to themselves and just get on with creating the Original Work.
Then what happens? Other, not-so-original thinkers come along, formularize the original innovations, and reproduce lame Robo-Creations that have no soul and are in every way inferior.
Case in point? Jimy Hendrix. Originality oozed out of the man’s pores; he was instincively unique. Since he blew everybody’s minds his style has been rehashed to the point where it is in itself a sanitized and overwrought cliche.
Don’t do the same old shit. Try harder! Combine your different interests and see what you can come up with! Analyse everything about yourself and find what it is that makes you You.
It’s not always easy, but actually being original, then working really hard at getting that “out there” is one of the major laws of success. Good luck!
6 comments Write a comment