An unexpected ass kicking (2012)

Imagining a thing and then spending a lifetime making it a reality is not the same as wanting to get rich or famous. It's not even obliquely related to the drive for success. In fact it's a failure mode. It's an intellectual pursuit that might make you wealthy, but probably won't, because wealth and acclaim are orthogonal to satisfying your own curiosity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Kirsch

"Without the man in the photo, the photo of this man wouldn’t exist."

An Unexpected Ass Kicking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4342790 - Aug 2012 (196 comments)

Worth reading just for that

That's hard to do in practice. The internet has made it clear to me that "Nothing new under the sun" has always been true. Almost every "original" idea that I have had I wind up finding having already been carried out by someone else first.

I believe however that original thinking is still a good thing to embrace although I am not sure that sitting down and saying to yourself, "Okay, now think of something to do that has never been done before" is a fruitful way to approach brainstorming. Original ideas seem to come about a little more organically (if they come at all).

> Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.

I like that one better. In general I like Kirsch's lamenting that we have become a flock of consumers rather than of creators. I feel so much better at least when I build/make things, not so good when I spend a stretch of evenings just consuming entertainment (doom scrolling, whathaveyou). I am on the fence though as to whether that is a new phenomena or whether that is somehow related to our seemingly modern entertainment culture.

To be sure there must have always been people unmotivated to create, build. But perhaps before radio, television, the internet, those same people at least would have wandered outside and knocked a baseball around, or looked for crawdads, or dropped sticks into a creek to watch them float away like small boats.