On Being Original
And trying not to be cool
The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.
- Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXXIII
4.3 billion people have access to a smartphone globally and within seconds can have access to history’s greatest-ever minds, ideas and stories. People have a near-unlimited amount of material to source and digest as they read for entertainment or betterment - from Orwell to Seneca, the Persian to the Roman Empires, Greek Mythology to Voodooism. But history’s greatest thinkers and doers didn’t just read and become talking pieces for their former teachers, they distilled and fine-tuned their workings and made them their own. They were originals.
When I was in training to become a Royal Marine back in 2009 I joined my troop which consisted of around about 75 people. Every 2 weeks on the training camp comes along another troop. So if my troop number was Troop 983 in two weeks came along Troop 984. The goal was to pass out with your green beret but there was also another goal, an unspoken goal that everybody wanted. Everybody wanted to be an original.
Being an original consisted of passing every test the first time. It wasn’t enough to simply pass out of training, which was already hard enough, you had to do everything right the first time and pass out with as many lads from your troop who could also do the same. It’s an enormous vanity metric in hindsight but the pull to be an original was as strong, if not stronger than passing out. Many lads, after getting back trooped (sent back a minimum of 2 weeks after failing something or getting injured) to another troop decide to leave.
I don’t know if I would have stayed if I got back trooped because thankfully I was 1 of 13 in my troop who passed out as an original. What I will say though is that being an original meant a great deal to me and it’s something that always will. It showed adaptability, humility and mental fortitude. I also came to understand the harsh reality that luck can play. Simply not getting injured or having your body breakdown was purely a lottery.
Originality (or lack thereof) seems like it’s a hot topic today but Seneca was also writing about originality some 2000 years ago.
"This is why I look on people like this as a spiritless lot the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else's shadow. They never venture to do for themselves the things they have spent such a long time learning. They exercise their memories on things that are not their own. It is one thing, however, to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own, and not to be dependent on some original and be constantly looking to see what the master said. 'Zeno said this, Cleanthes that.' Let's have some difference between you and the books!"
- Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXXIII
Here Seneca is speaking about a lack of originality from people who do nothing other than act as talking pieces for the people whose ideas or words they are using. They’re pretenders.
Hop on your phone, go on social media if you use it and go on your feed. It will more than likely be full of trends. People repeating something in the hope that it’ll bring them as much micro-fame and exposure as somebody else before them. It’ll also be full of Twitter (X) bros exclaiming how to be original with a not-so-original ‘how to be original blueprint’ for only £999!
There is also the flip side of this - doing things just to be different. The rebel. Going against the grain for the sake of it.
I’m not here to say which is right or wrong and we can’t be original in every area of our life. Imagine if everybody had to be original in everything they did all the time? That sounds exhausting. So there is safety in numbers and humans have known this forever. I did an article on herd mentality you can read here.
Seneca has been called a hypocrite by some because he was a wealthy man and a philosopher but to me, and many others what he did was something original and it’s exactly because of that that people remember him. Many unhappy, poor philosophers in the graveyard of time will never be remembered. Seneca took the writings and teachings of others before him and thought about them and how they affected his life and the world around him and adapted them. He used what was useful and discarded what was not. If that’s not original then I don’t know what is.
Elon Musk started Space X and changed people’s thinking about space rockets forever. For decades the genuine geniuses at NASA used the rockets as a single-use item but Musk demonstrated within 2 decades that rockets can be reused changing space flight forever. This is on top of his other billion-dollar-plus companies!
Musk is a famous proponent of first-principle thinking. He takes ideas from other people/disciplines and strips them right back to their skeleton, ridding them of everything that is of no use to him and keeping only what is essential. Elon Musk is certainly an original.
People worry that AI will take over, that it will fill some void that only humans are capable of filling but I see a version of AI everywhere already. I see humans doing exactly what we say AI will be, being unoriginal.
Seneca said that:
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own. Besides, a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking.
- Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXXIII
Being original in some area of your life requires dedication, faith and luck. But something I’ve spoken about more recently in this newsletter after reading through Paul Graham’s essays is curiosity. Curiosity is the key to originality. Being curious requires that you ask questions and that you poke and prod things. Elon Musk poked and prodded space rockets and certainly asked questions. The first one perhaps was can we turn this into a reusable rocket in some way shape or form? His idea or question at inception may have been wholly different from the outcome but he got there by climbing branches from the trees he planted.
"You shouldn't attack a topic unless you have a way in — some new insight about it or way of approaching it. You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind of gap you can explore. In fact, merely having questions about something other people take for granted can be edge enough. If you come across a question that's sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous. Many an important discovery has been made by pulling on a thread that seemed insignificant at first."
Paul Graham, The Best Essay
Musk didn’t take pride in an idea that wasn’t his own (space rockets are a single-use item) and he probably got a few funny looks the first time he said this out loud to people but Elon Musk doesn’t follow paths laid out before him. He makes his own.
Not all of us have the appetite, bandwidth and dedication to achieve something like this but your idea of originality can be as big or as small as you want it to be. After all, Musk didn’t think of something entirely new, he simply remixed a pre-held notion or idea. Charlie Munger called this Physics envy:
"Be careful to avoid physics envy, the common human craving to reduce enormously complex systems (such as those in economics) to one-size-fits-all Newtonian formulas. Instead, he faithfully honours Albert Einstein's admonition: "A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Or, in his own words: "What I'm against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular action will do more good than harm. You're dealing with highly complex systems wherein everything is interacting with everything else."
- Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack
You never quite know that what you are doing will be something original if you’re looking forward to the outcome of something. Charles Darwin may or may not have thought that his theory of evolution would turn into anything let alone change biology forever. It’s certainly easier to determine if something is so after the fact and my least favourite bias the hindsight bias will tell you this but if Charles Darwin wasn’t curious and if he didn’t ask questions or poke and prod he almost certainly wouldn’t have got to the conclusions he did.
So really if you want to be original then it goes without saying that you need to be curious and you need to be willing to follow ideas down paths especially if you don’t know where they lead. There’s a comparison I think helps explain how to be original really clearly: You have two types of people, those who are cool and those who try to be cool. People who try to be cool aren’t cool exactly because they’re trying to be cool. Cool people are cool because well, they’re cool. Using Charlie Munger’s advice on inversion I’d say it’s certainly easier to not be a pretender (uncool) than it is to be original (cool).
So we should maybe start with that? As always, the choice is ours to make.
Until next time, The School of Knowledge.
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Photo by João Jesus: https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-photo-of-a-red-tulip-flower-2480072/