Recognizing ORIGINALS

Keywords: originals

What are the originals?

Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas, but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world.

ORIGINALS are late to the party.

Precrastinator: Panic a few hours before a big deadline.

The precrastinators, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate^1 moderately.
It’s only when you’re told that you’re going to be working on this problem, and the you start procrastinating, but the task is still active in the back of your mind, that you start to incubate^2. Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps

Aaron Sorkin: You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.

Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. It’s much easier to improve on somebody else’s idea than it is to create something new from scratch.
To be original you don’t have to be first. You just have to be different and better.

ORIGINALS feel doubt and fear.

There’s self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine. The key to being original is just a simple thing.

There is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users.

It’s about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option.

Vuja de is when you look at something you’ve seen many times before and all of sudden see it with fresh eyes.

When you feel doubt, don’t let it go.
ORIGINALS afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they’re even more afraid of failing to try. In a long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas. The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most.
Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.