ORIGINALITY:

What to embrace, fight, stop and start to rediscover your voice and create your best ideas.

Everyone wants to let their work have a stronger voice and be more original but we have to deal with self-doubt, group think, and working for companies that demand conformity to a shared culture and way of thinking. In this episode, we will look at what makes up the foundation of originality and then explore the things that you need to embrace, fight, stop and start to rediscover your voice, fight the forces that want to strip your originality away from you and give you a roadmap for how to create better ideas with more originality.

Listen now:

This is a show I’ve been working on for a long time because I’ve talked a lot about creativity over the course of this show. The challenge for all of us is that even once you start to understand the steps of how you have an idea and how to summon your creativity on demand there is still a huge challenge out there – originality.

I want you to take a minute and think of your favorite artists, musicians, designer or another creative person. Do you have that person in your mind? I am going to bet that their work stands out because it isn’t like anything else. And this is the dilemma so many of us wrestle with. We love, follow and fetishize originals. People who stand out, have a strong voice and do their own thing as originals. Yet as creatives we all have self-doubt, are unsure of ourselves and work in places that demand conformity to a shared culture and way of thinking.

In this episode, I want to explore this tension and share some of the hard lessons I’ve learned.

Foundation

Originality is born in your story and background. It starts to find expression in a strong, original inner voice grounded that guides who you are. It gets stronger when you own what makes you unique. It sets you apart when it drives the quality of your ideas and sets the standard you hold those ideas to. Yet all of these things are some of the most difficult and personal issues we will ever have to tackle.

What you need to EMBRACE

Embrace honesty with yourself and your work.
Embrace that the more honest you are the more people you will connect with.

Embrace that we all share the human condition of insecurity and uncertainty.

Embrace that we are all born originals.

What you need to FIGHT

Fight the need to appeal to everyone.

Fight the want to be a jack of all trades.

Fight being insecure from creating from your experiences.

Fight the fear of being judged for standing for something.

Fight group think.

Fight our educational system, society and jobs trying to take originality away from us.

What you need to STOP

Stop Imposter syndrome.

Stop rationalizing.

Stop making excuses.

Stop stopping yourself.

Stop copying and looking to what others are doing for inspiration.

Stop judging your insides by other people’s outsides.

What you need to START

Start making more statements and fewer questions.

Start developing a palette judge your ideas against.

Start having a lot of ideas and not just a few big ones.

Start making decision based on evidence and not intuition.

Start living your work and notice the things that stand out to you.

Start getting inspiration from as lot of sources outside of your field.

Start putting in the work even if you don’t know when you will need it.