The Best Ideas Come When I Stop Trying to be original

There was a point in my life where I was constantly chasing “originality”.

Every time I started something, the question in my head was:

“Has someone already done this?”
“Is this novel enough?”
“Will this blow minds?”

And if the answer was no, I’d drop it. And it was that urge to make it big in life that made me drop it, cause no matter what, being in a second-tier Indian Engineering college sucks ass. And to get out of this hellhole, I realised I needed to do something big, but being a freshman kiddo, I didn’t know much.

Somewhere along the way, spending all my time at SRA-VJTI, I realised this.

Originality is overrated.

This I realised when just building things from scratch took so much willpower and motivation to complete. (I am still doing them 😭)

To give an example, I wanted to build my cpu core and run shit on it. Even now, the cpu core is not close enough to be working with real hardware, forget that, it’s not yet running on an FPGA (after the pipelining is done).

This leads to the point that even building things from scratch, which something people have done before is in itself is a difficult task and you learn from that than ever sitting in classrooms.

It wasn’t the work which was original, it was my insight into how those things worked which was deeper and more original.

When you stop being original,

1. You start building faster.
2. You start learning more.
3. You get more creative ideas to work on top of the current work.

So yeah. These days, I’m fine with not being original. I want to be the one who understands what I’m building, and then later move into more creative ideas which fruit from the work.