Stop Trying to Impress Yourself

Inside all of us is a desire to do and create something world changing and significant with every action. However, we often allow this obsession to overshadow how much we actually know to accomplish the problem at hand.

Working with a creative team has many benefits, but today, I want to hit at one of the largest problems — the compulsive feeling that you must outpace previous work and impress yourself with novel ideas time and again.

Inside all of us is a desire to do and create something world changing and significant with every action. However, we often allow this obsession to overshadow how much we actually know to accomplish the problem at hand. We skin the cat once, get bored, and move on, not realizing how much we actually learned.

We can fail to recognize all of the things that we do know and become completely unaware of how fresh and exciting our current knowledge is to those we’re serving. We don’t believe that the basics and what is “common knowledge” to us, is completely foreign and fascinating to many others we are producing for.

We think that unless it is a novel idea, it lacks value for those around us — an unfortunate bi-product of living in a fast-paced world where it feels like new products are launching everyday. The reality is that if you look at many of the products being put to market today, they are primarily iterations on other products.

Not novel, not new in concept. Just new to you.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at a company who is great at this: Google.

Google is seen as the top-tier innovative company leading the charge with data-mining, and most recently, taking deep dives in to physical product creation. They recently released a full line-up of products and everyone is talking about how innovative they are.

Realistically it is a collection of Google’s take on existing products and ideas:

• Google Home vs. Amazon’s Alexa
• Google DayDream VR vs. Oculus Rift
• Google’s Pixel vs. iPhone (admittedly, one of it’s largest aesthetic criticisms)
• Chromecast vs. Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, etc.

Finally, and this it the easiest one to forget: that whole “world’s largest search engine” thing…they weren’t the first one there either.

Where Google has succeeded the most is in their willingness to learn the pre-existing systems so well, and mulled them over with internal iteration (and their ridiculous amount of user data-gathering) to find new opportunities to innovate that weren’t there previously. They aren’t trying to create something new. They are trying to find things you already like and then make them better than the next guy.

Innovation and originality doesn’t come from building the first lego block.

It’s about acknowledging the blocks that exist, getting really good at building cool structures with them until you realize that you need to design a new block to fit the creation you know is possible to make. With enough iterating on “unoriginal ideas” you might be able to identify one that hasn’t been seen before. This is the entrepreneurial spirit and where businesses are born.

So. Don’t overthink it. You know enough. Stop racking your brain and trying to impress yourself with how original you can be. Identify and organize what you know to make something unintentionally original from someone else’s perspective.

It might not be new and original to you every time, but it will be to many others.