Originality Is Overrated!

Execution Is Everything.

Thank you to my friend Bryant Duhon for inspiring me to finish this article.

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Two weeks ago, I had coffee with a friend who has been “working on” his novel for six years.

SIX.

He said he still hasn’t been able to start writing because he’s stuck trying to find an idea that feels completely original. I asked him what he’d been reading lately to help with this search.

Nothing.

He’s not reading anything because he’s worried other books might “contaminate” his originality.

So he’s sitting there in the coffee shop, guarding an idea that doesn’t exist yet from influences that might actually help him build it. And the worst part is that he thinks refusing to read other people’s work makes his future work purer. More legitimate. Like he’s keeping some kind of creative virginity that the market is waiting to reward.

I wanted to tell him his entire creative philosophy was upside down and needed to be completely disassembled and rebuilt. But you can’t just say that to someone over a coffee. Whisky, maybe, but not coffee! So instead, I asked him what his favorite book was.

“East of Eden,” he said.

I told him Steinbeck lifted the whole thing from the Bible. Cain and Abel. He just moved it to California and added lettuce farming.

He looked at me like I’d just told him Santa wasn’t real. Like I had personally taken something from him. It was truly something to see.

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Here Is The Part Where I Confess I Was Also Wrong, Just Differently

I dropped out of a creative writing program in 1998 for almost the opposite reason.

Instead of finding their own voices, everyone just absorbed whatever they read and ended up sounding like imitations of imitations.

Read Hemingway one week, and suddenly everyone was writing in terse, muscular sentences about fishing or whatever. Read Faulkner the next week, and we were all drowning in a stream of consciousness and unnecessary semicolons. The professor called it “finding your influences.”

I called it an extremely expensive translation.

So which is it?

Read everything or read nothing?

Be inspired, or stay pure?

Neither. Both are the same mistake

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The Translators

The workshop model pretends imitation is a flaw, when imitation is the whole system.

Think about it:

Cormac McCarthy is translating William Faulkner.
William Faulkner is translating James Joyce.
James Joyce is translating Homer.

It’s a translation all the way down.

Some people just translate it better than others.

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The Mathematics of Recombination

A mathematician once explained to me that there are 40,320 ways to arrange eight different items. Just eight things.

By the time you get to ten items, you’re looking at over three million permutations. Twenty items - That’s 2.4 quintillion arrangements.

Now think about ideas. Even if you’re only working with concepts that have existed for fifty years, the possible combinations are functionally infinite.

You don’t lack ideas. You’re just waiting too long to use what you already have.

Let’s talk about romance novels for a second because romance novels will tell you everything you need to know about how creative success actually works. Romance pulled in $1.44 billion in 2022. Billion with a B.

That same year, print romance sales jumped 52 percent while overall book sales declined. You know how many romance tropes there actually are?

Seven. Maybe eight if you’re being generous.

Meet cute. Enemies to lovers. Fake relationship. Second chance. Forbidden love.

That’s it. That’s the whole schtick.

Every romance novel ever written is one of these structures with different names swapped in. Readers don’t want novelty. They want the PATTERN. They want to feel the pattern working on them like a warm bath. They get annoyed when you mess with it too much.

Agatha Christie understood this completely. She wrote 66 detective novels using slight variations of the same design. The crime appears early. An amateur sleuth gets pulled in. Red herrings are distributed throughout. Everything wraps up with a dramatic reveal in a room where everyone is present for some reason. She was not losing her shit about originality. She built a machine that readers loved, and she ran that machine for decades.

You don’t need a better system. You need to stop doing a mediocre job with the one you have.

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What Chefs Understand That Writers Don’t

My friend Matt runs a five-star restaurant in Trinidad. One night, after service, I asked him about originality. He looked at me like I'd asked whether he serves ketchup with filet mignon.

“You know what molecular gastronomy is?” he said. “It’s basically chemistry techniques borrowed from labs, applied to food.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me his kitchen’s recipe database. Hundreds of dishes, each tagged with its lineage. “This fish preparation? It’s a Vietnamese technique I learned in Hanoi, combined with a French sauce I modified from Escoffier, plated in a style I saw at Noma. I’m not pretending I invented fish. I’m just trying to make the best version of it you’ve ever tasted.”

Chefs are shameless about their influences because the proof is immediate. Either the dish works, or it doesn’t. You can’t hide behind claims of being too innovative for pedestrian palates. If it tastes bad, you failed. This honesty keeps the profession grounded in a way that writing and art often aren’t.

Writers can always claim their work is “ahead of its time” or “too experimental for mainstream audiences.” Chefs face critics who’ll spit out food that doesn’t work. Maybe we need more critics willing to spit.

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The Part About Money Because Money Is Real

Here is what people inside publishing will tell you if you ask them directly: the books that sell are not the groundbreaking ones. They are the ones who take a working formula and execute it well.

Most National Book Award winners don’t crack 30,000 copies. Literary fiction that wins prizes usually sells in the low tens of thousands.

Meanwhile, Colleen Hoover writes the same new-adult romance beats over and over and sold 8.6 million books in 2022. The market rewards the recognizable far more than the revolutionary, and it has been doing so consistently for decades.

And yet we hold onto this extremely romantic idea that real artists suffer for their originality. That Van Gogh died poor because the world wasn’t ready for his genius.

Except Van Gogh wasn't working in isolation either. His brother Theo ran a gallery. Vincent had full access to the Paris art scene. He was immersed in what the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were doing, absorbing, copying, and tweaking the whole time. He didn't die poor because he was too original for the world to understand. He died poor because he was ill and couldn't sell. Those are different problems with different solutions.

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Stop Checking for Originality. Start Checking for Usefulness.

Those are completely different filters with completely different results, and only one of them matters.

Morgan Housel wrote The Psychology of Money, and it made him a very comfortable living. What’s in it? Financial advice that has existed forever.

Save money.

Don’t make emotional decisions.

Time in the market beats timing the market.

Compound interest is powerful.

None of this was new information. He just said it clearly, at the right moment, for people who needed to hear it in 2020 in that particular format. That’s the entire secret.

James Clear wrote Atomic Habits in 2018, and it has sold over 15 million copies. People have been studying habit formation since William James in the 1890s. Charles Duhigg covered most of the same ground in The Power of Habit in 2012. Clear’s book did better because it was better organized, clearer, and more practical. Not more original. Better executed.

The creator economy runs entirely on this logic, and anyone telling you otherwise is either selling you something or protecting their ego. Successful YouTubers copy formats and add their personality.

Newsletter writers combine existing ideas and add their perspective. Case in point.

Course creators teach skills that have been taught for centuries. The winners are not the most original. They are the clearest, the most consistent, or the best at getting their work in front of people.

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Your ideas aren’t as unique as you think they are.

Mine aren’t either. And that is completely fine.

Your individual outlook is the combination of these three variables.

1. What you’ve consumed (inputs: books, films, conversations, art, media)

2. Your personality (temperament, values, sense of humor, obsessions, taste)

3. Your lived experience (where you grew up, what happened to you, your context)

You are not channeling the universe. You are remixing your inputs. The inputs matter. The remix matters. But pretending you generated something from nothing is a story you’re telling yourself, and it is not helping you.

Comedians understand this because comedy has no mercy. Either people laugh, or they don’t. There’s no hiding behind integrity or vision or “they weren’t ready for it.”

Jerry Seinfeld has talked openly about borrowing from George Carlin and Robert Klein.

Nobody in comedy pretends they invented humor. The field is too competitive, and the feedback is too immediate.

But in other creative fields, we let people stall out for years pursuing originality. We let them workshop the same screenplay for a decade. We let them sit in coffee shops protecting ideas from the contamination of reality, while the years go by, and the idea just sits there, unbuilt, unread, unshared, helping absolutely nobody, including the person protecting it.

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What To Actually Do With This Information

Take the idea you’ve been sitting on. The one that feels too similar to something that already exists. If you can make it better — if you can serve an audience that’s being underserved, if you have a perspective that’s genuinely yours, if you can execute it more clearly or more specifically or more honestly than the version that already exists — then build it.

The similarity is not the problem. The problem is waiting for a permission that will never come. Or waiting for a version of the idea so completely original that it has no reference points for anyone to understand it, which is just another way of waiting forever.

There’s a difference between stealing and learning. Between copying and being influenced. Between ripping someone off and seeing a gap in what exists and filling it in your way.

My friend David ☕ calls it 'finding the gap' - the space between what you give your audience and what you leave for them to complete. You provide the structure. They bring the meaning. That exchange is where the work becomes theirs, too.

Do the work. Make it yours through execution, through your specific experience, through the audience you actually serve. If it works, you’ve added something real to the world. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something you couldn’t have learned any other way.

Either outcome is further ahead than sitting there guarding a blank page from the contamination of actually starting.

Thank you so much for reading!

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Shout-out to one of my earliest paid subscribers, Michelle Singer, for keeping me caffeinated.

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Smashing that ❤️ button or sharing this post keeps the wheels on this greasy squirrel wheel.

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