Original Enough
When I think of reinventing the wheel, qualities that come to mind are unique and different bordering around something that hasn't been done before, in the sense that one is stripping away all prior assumptions to solve a problem from the ground up.
There's usually a criticism against "reinventing the wheel" from efficiency experts. Why waste time on something that already exists?
As a tangent, I think the flywheel effect heavily borrows from the physics of momentum compounding and given that most creations are dynamic in one form or another, refining the different components allows the system to increase its speed without requiring new energy inputs.
But alas, the innovator's dilemma also lives in this same space between.
Doing the right thing too well
Clayton Christensen, author of the book Innovator's Dilemma explores how successful companies fail via doing the right things too well. They optimize the current wheel so thoroughly that when the terrain changes entirely, they're left with a masterpiece that no longer matters.
Kodak was still busy trying to perfect film when the ground shifted to digital.
The prefix "re-" signifies a return to the origin and always keeps surfacing in how I frame my own agency, especially when it comes to any form of creation.
I'd prefer to rethink that money is simply a token of trust, or I'm reimagining flat terrains to become multi-dimensional landscapes. Let's recreate the context itself.
It hints at a recursive loop, a bit similar to this common saying that nothing is genuinely new under the sun.
Nothing to nothing
Peter Thiel's "zero to one" pushes back against re-thinking entirely and argues for creating something genuinely unprecedented rather than iterating on what exists.
Although I understand the premise where this is coming from, i.e., vertical progress in a world of horizontal copying, until when you examine most "zero to one" innovations closely and realize they're almost always recombinations of existing elements in novel configurations.
Maybe that too is its own form of newness, and I'm just dabbling with wordplay here. Airplanes will probably never have existed if birds weren't providing the biological proof of concept, but then, there's a whole world of mechanical difference between both creations.
Remix culture
Individually, the desire to be unique and different carries this same upstream-downstream flow.
Upstream, before creation, people, myself included, tend to have the romantic notion that we're channelling a divine spark to produce something the world has never seen.
After the work is done and the adrenaline fades, you realize your "original" insight borrows a lot from the information you've consumed in the external world.
The only exception I can think of right now is the belief that there are exceptions.
The more honest version is we're all engaged in an ongoing sophisticated remix culture where inputs are constantly shuffled into new outputs.
That said, a real trap is not recognizing novelty for value. Being different for the sake of being different is just another form of being the same.
It is the architect designing a house with no doors just to challenge the concept of entry.
Wanting to stand apart
I sometimes have this urge to be contrarian to prove I can think independently, which is itself a form of conformity born from the desire for distinction.
At the end of the day, in creating something that genuinely serves a need/solves a problem, one will inevitably draw from what already exists.
Whether that happens through perfecting an existing wheel or imagining an entirely new vehicle matters very little to those it serves.
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