![]() ![]() In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from-it’s where you take them to.’” And don’t bother concealing your thievery-celebrate it if you feel like it. Authenticity is invaluable originality is non-existent. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. As the film director Jim Jarmusch advised, “ Nothing is original. Mary Shelley put it this way in the nineteenth century, in a preface for Frankenstein: “ Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” ![]() The phrase can be traced back to the twelfth century, when the author John of Salisbury wrote that philosopher Bernard of Chartres compared people to dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants and said that “ we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” Ironically, Newton’s turn of phrase wasn’t even entirely his own. It doesn’t make what you do less valuable. Standing on the shoulders of giants is a necessary part of creativity, innovation, and development. With each iteration, they could see a little further, and they were content in the knowledge that future generations would, in turn, stand on their shoulders. They mastered the best of what other people had already figured out, then made that expertise their own. No matter how unique or unprecedented a work seems, dig a little deeper and you will always find that the creator stood on someone else’s shoulders. Innovative ideas have to come from somewhere. It can be easy to look at great geniuses like Newton and imagine that their ideas and work came solely out of their minds, that they spun it from their own thoughts-that they were true originals. ![]() “ If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “ it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Doers and thinkers from Shakespeare to Jobs, liberally “stole” inspiration from the doers and thinkers who came before. ![]()
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