Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

The idea that you weren't born creative is a comfortable excuse. What separates people who propose something new from people who just complain in silence is not a rare talent, it's the willingness to act even while feeling the same fear everyone feels. Being original here doesn't mean a lone genius in a garage, it means someone who questions the status quo and tries a different way, even with no guarantee that it will work.

Research shows that most people see a problem at work, in the HOA, or in the neighborhood group chat, and swallow their criticism because it feels safer than putting themselves out there. An original thinker is someone who turns that discomfort into a concrete proposal, even with a shaky voice when it's time to speak.

That changes the question worth asking. It's not "do I have the right personality for this?" but "am I willing to risk the small cost of seeming annoying in order to try to improve something that bothers everyone around me?"

Putting off a task usually has a bad reputation, but holding an idea for a while, instead of rushing off to execute it right away, gives it room to mature and to take in paths that haste would never let you see. People who hand in the first draft immediately tend to repeat the obvious solution, while people who let the idea rest a bit usually come back with a more original version.

This is not the same as procrastinating aimlessly until the deadline blows up on you. It's deliberately setting aside a pause between the first idea and the final execution, letting your mind work underneath while you take care of something else.

An everyday example: someone who writes the difficult message to the HOA group all at once, in the heat of anger, almost always gets it wrong. Someone who writes it, sits on it for a day and rereads it before sending communicates better and avoids pointless drama.

The first idea that comes to mind is usually the most obvious one, because it's the easiest to pull from memory. Being truly original is not having a single flash of genius, it's producing a large volume of ideas, many of them weak, until one is left that really surprises.

This requires tolerating the uncomfortable feeling of putting forward bad ideas in front of other people. Those who freeze up out of fear of suggesting something silly end up never reaching the good idea that was ten attempts away.

In practice, this applies to any work meeting or family conversation about solving a problem: the more options on the table, the greater the chance that a solution nobody had thought of yet will show up. A group that offers five timid ideas tends to get stuck on the first one; a group that offers thirty, a good part of them disposable, has a much better chance of stumbling onto the route nobody saw at first.