New Ideas Are Born from Copying — Here’s How

Everything that is new is copied

Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash

Imagine you learnt from one person how to make Weetabix, from a second person how to milk a cow, and from a third person that adding milk to coffee is a good idea. Also, imagine that nobody has yet discovered that milk added to Weetabix is a good idea.

So here you are, knowing how to make Weetabix and how to milk a cow, and knowing that adding milk to coffee is a good idea. All great things to know, and all things you have copied from other people.

Let’s imagine that one day, you have used this knowledge to make yourself a bowl of Weetabix, and you plan to have a cup of coffee with milk in it while eating it. Let’s imagine that the milk you plan to add to your coffee, which you have milked from a cow, is next to you on the table, and you accidentally spill it into your bowl of Weetabix.

Imagine you then think to yourself, Well, I normally add milk to my coffee, which I’ve learned is a good idea, so maybe adding milk to Weetabix is a good idea, and so you taste it.

Boom. You have just used copied knowledge to discover something new. Weetabix with milk on it tastes good. It’s not a new discovery, and yet it is.

I give you technological evolution. Every single discovery, every single invention, every single innovation, is made this way. We use copied knowledge to create something new.

All we are doing is adding it all together, and when we do that, we get new things to add to the information pool that people can copy from.

This is why technology is exploding at a rate like never before. There are more of us than ever, and we have access to all those people, which means we can copy from all those people, and as we can copy from all those people, we are getting ever more things to add to the information pool.

And everything is made this way; there are no exceptions to this, not even from an Einstein. For example, Einstein learned from Newton, from Galileo, from all the geniuses that came before him, and he used everything he copied from them to reach into the darkness and pull out light. Charles Darwin did the same thing.

Speaking of Einstein, he taught us that mathematics can be used to describe everything. It can be used to describe this, and I’m copying his philosophy on life to write this equation to prove that:

What I learned from this person + what I learned from that person + what I learned from every person + initiative = discovery

Nothing is truly new; it is merely an evolution of what has already been discovered. Add this discovery to that discovery, and you get a new discovery.

The crazy thing is that means the more discoveries we make, the more discoveries we have the capability of making, which means discovery is an exponential game. The more information we have, the more we can add together to create new information.

When you learn this, you learn the power of discovery.

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