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Originality

Be Original

The earth beneath your soles has always been there also. Likewise the mountains, the seas, and the air you breathe, the comings and goings of night and day.

Human experiences too have remained the same through the ages: life, death, wars, religions, sadness, the search for identity, success, wealth, happiness, etc. It is so obvious that nothing is new. No wonder then that the shape of the world is spherical. Everything moves round and round; celestial bodies, human circles of emotions, experiences etc. We live in a world of circles.

What goes around, comes around. It explains why the human head takes the shape of a ball. Our thoughts travel in circular motions. This is the same reason human beings are babies in the morning; adults at noon only to go back to being babies when our strengths are spent.

You have a child, he goes to school, finishes school and begins to work. He gets a wife and leaves you alone to be with his immediate family. You become a bachelor again (if your wife is dead or if you are divorced). If your spouse is still alive and very much in love with you, you return to her. You die, your son buries you. This is the same thing that happens between you and your parents.

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Although life does not always strictly play out in this format, the alterations are often little and many a time, inconsequential. Little changes in human plot may as well be so seismic. But that’s a bolt from the blue. The grand archetypal plot of human life is the same all the way.

Yet, if you want the world to mind you, you must mind your unique ways of doing things. So many things appear in boring patterns so they don’t arrest attention anymore. Routine life spells death for creativity in that we become robotic at repetitive activities. We stop using our minds. Once that happens, we just follow the motions of life to the grave.

We become part of the statistics of the ones who once lived and now dead. Our offices are filled with people who are incapable of exploring the other parts of their minds because their daily routines don’t demand out-of-the-box actions. Routines soon harden into habits that rule our lives. How does one find a spark of novelty amidst these boring repetitions?

However, there is something about a routine existence that gives a clue to mastery of an art, profession or action. Before you can become a master of anything, you must have gone through repetitive processes that make performing an activity seem easy.

Everything you ever want to do is broken down into series of activities. Master each activity and become a master in your field. With Roberto Carlos, playing free kicks is a child’s play; with Lionel Messy, scoring goals looks so easy; with Nathaniel Hawthorn, writing looks like a joke; with William Shakespeare, scripting a story is a piece of cake.

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Have you cared to know the amount of time these people invested into mastering little activities that resulted in their mastering the things they did? You can be a master of literature, machines, animals, medicine, stage etc. but you’d have to do repeatedly the little things that will make you become a reference point in each endeavour.

When you mindfully repeat an activity, you are likely to stumble upon a spark of novelty that no one has ever discovered and that would be the next new thing under the sky. The new thing therefore is the application of yourself to an activity. This is called style. Helon Habila and Jude Dibia are novelists, what differentiates them is the style each brings to the art of storytelling.

Loretta Lyn and Dolly Parton are country musicians, the difference in their music is the amount of personal taste/self that each imposes on her music. Everybody walks but Ajala had his special way of walking that took him round the world and turned him into a walking celebrity. The newness is not in what you do, it’s often in how you do it, the much of yourself that you impose on your trade/art.

Without settling yourself wholeheartedly upon what you do, you can never achieve any height of originality. Inventiveness is the ability to recreate the created. You begin the recreation from yourself. Mother has birthed you, it is time you birthed yourself.

Self-recreation starts from finding out something you love to do, something that you can do for free, something that will be your positive contribution to humanity, your passion. Most inventions didn’t start and end with the first original inventors, other people often enter the scene to work on what’s on ground and make it better.

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Certainly, the airplane that the Wright brothers gave us is not the same with the various kinds of airplanes we use today. What happened? Other geniuses came along the line and queued into the idea of man flying in the sky. They figured out it is not enough to fly, we must also fly in speed, comfort and style.

Creativity is a science, science of linking one thing to another. If you desire genuine originality, you must be able to create relationships amongst ideas. In other words, you should be able to understand how metaphors work. How does the eye of a lizard look like the shit of a goat? Can you find the link between the headlamp of a car and the eye of an eagle? Does a snake look like a train? Develop a weird sense of abstractions and you will see the greatness that lies in common things.

Curiosity can be a pathway to new inventions. Being curious suggests that you are open to alien ideas. There is no way you can find new ideas if you don’t allow your mind to work tirelessly on ideas which are already in existence.

Zeddicus said in the movie Legend of the Seeker “To see what is invisible gaze upon what is.” What can make you pay a close attention to what is if not sheer curiosity? There is something new about every old thing. If we look at antiquity long enough, we would find shades of novelty.

Written by Omidire, Idowu Joshua

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