Welcome to the 13th installment of The Newsletter. This week we're talking about something that frustrates me – That being personal take and rendition.

I think it's very healthy to have creative conversations with loved ones, friends, strangers, and fellow artists. Truthfully, I have weeks go by where I don't have a single conversation that fulfills me creatively but then often times find myself doing a hard pivot and engaging in discourse regarding creative lifestyle and process repeatedly - subconsciously catching up for all of those missed opportunities when I was busy maybe? I dont know. Nonetheless it's always vital for our creative mind to be poked and proded into new ideas. However, I've noticed a recurring theme in almost every single conversation I have with friends or fellow creatives within the last 6 to 8 months that really frustrates me. This installment to The Newsletter is me calling them out and attempting to re-frame mindsets – mine somewhat included.

Here's the situation:

I'm sitting with a friend or maybe several that I genuinely respect and always enjoy conversation with. We begin talking about a project that someone is working on or maybe even a random pop-culture moment. Not long into the conversation, someone brings up an idea they have currently or maybe had at one point but gave up on due to an outside source of discouragement. Nothing wrong with this right? Wrong. Almost every single time I find myself and one of these conversations where a friend or peer expresses an idea they’ve given up on, it's almost always accredited to the same thing.

"I loved the idea but I realized _______ had already done something similar."

These seem to be the magic words to kickstart the death and burial of an idea.

Whenever I hear this statement I begrudgingly nod my head and can't help but wonder why this realization caused an idea to come to a screeching halt. I'm guilty of this as well, but I’m angered on behalf of my peers because I feel like I've had a revelation that others are missing out on. This newsletter will hopefully stir the pot and mind of those reading this tangent.

Here's a wild thought – Don't shelf your own idea because someone else that you have (most likely) never met and never will meet has done something within their career that carries slightly similar traits? This is foolish.

Need we be reminded that "every idea has already been done" again? I'm sure many of you have seen the best selling but never really read through coffee table book, 'Steal Like an Artist' that people love posting photos of. If not, I highly recommend you buy it and take a photo of it, you'll love it. I have a hard time convincing myself that similar art is comparative, competitive, and innately a battle of "who did it better." Good ideas should be consumed and archived for your library of inspiration for later use.

I love this statement from Mark Earls: "Our culture has a very strong individualist strand: we prize the individual over the group and distrust those who don't have a strong sense of authentic self, who don't ‘know their own mind', ‘self-actualize', ‘sing their own song' or whatever metaphor is popular down the dark self-help aisle in the bookstore. We pride ourselves on the uniqueness of our ideas, our thoughts, and our expressions. So the thought of saying that we copied someone else’s ideas would mean that we are not smart enough or creative enough or inventive enough to develop our own ideas. We worship originality, but actually, copying is an innate human skill – one we need for survival. We copy to learn, to understand, and to gain social status by mimicking others."

I love this take because it's raw and remains true for creative thought, but also for the culture we live in. One focused on being the best, the first, the coolest, and the most original.

This is what I think of when I mentioned earlier that I’ve recently found myself involved in an influx of conversations where people talk themselves down from an idea because they've seen something similar. Again, I too can sometimes be guilty of this as well, but I'm improving as I learn that my version of something is also a valid interpretation. God forbid that you see an idea through to completion and someone connects the dots to your reference. That would shatter the illusion that you’ve worked so hard to maintain that you're the FIRST person to EVER have that thought.

But what if you see an idea through to completion and even though every single person knows where the inspiration came from… Yours is favored over the original. Then what?

It should be clear that I am in no way, shape, or form encouraging replicating ideas. I think replicating an idea can never be done in good taste. I think it shows confusion, poor judgement, and lack of understanding. What I am encouraging is not backing down from an idea that you have birthed from a place of being inspired by something. There's a huge difference between inspiration and replication.

That being said, what does your version look like?