Bright, Not Brilliant: Overcoming Trounced Notions of Orginality

 

It’s awfully fun to be young and creative. You wrap your limbs around a handful of new ideas, each of which seem to define the world in its entirety, and then you set about sprouting new ideas of your own. Each of these, you’re sure, could change the world of art, science, or social relations just as much as it changed your own perceptions. The people are silly, backward, or blind, but now a young genius has come along who will truly make them see.

One day, among the readings for a college class or in an old documentary, you happen upon an idea you thought was your own. The first time, it’s exhilarating. “Oh my God,” you think, giving yourself not so much a high five as an exuberant celebratory shaking. “I produced the same thought as X, so I must be just as brilliant!”

Then it happens again and again, and the initial euphoria at seeing yourself as a fellow traveler of the greats gives way to a growing sense of panic as all your grand theories, all the private breakthroughs that marked your superiority to your peers, fall claim to the thinkers of the past. Sure, you were clever enough to come up with some novel ideas, but they were only novel to you. What had seemed a blast of innovation was just a parochial lack of awareness.

This is an unsettling, demoralizing, and profoundly humbling realization. You’re not brilliant, but merely bright. You’ve created or changed nothing of note. As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, you might as well have never been born.

So what is one to do? Put down the pen, shred the library card, and commit oneself to the guiltless enjoyment of pop music? 

Or keep at it?

It’s the latter path I’ve decided to make my own. I find solace in the fact that countless greats, almost all thinkers, innovators, and enactors of true genius, must have passed through their own share of ultimately unoriginal innovations. They, too, saw their ideas suddenly appear among the flotsam of the past. And what did they do? They kept thinking, kept innovating, kept pushing the boundaries of what they were sure they already knew. And eventually, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, they came up with a philosophical formulation, artistic method, or scientific hypothesis that really was new. 

Looking at some of my past literary efforts can be cringe inducing (and I’m sure I’m not alone in that). What’s even worse is remembering how proud I was of each “innovation” at the time. 

Despite my shame at my hubristic past, the only solution is to keep pushing the limits, keep stretching beyond my own understanding in the hopes I’m stretching beyond the readership’s understanding as well. All it takes is a little bit of courage — the courage to look back, cringe, and still try again, knowing full well that my current endeavors might some day produce that same gnawing embarrassment.