It's True.
See, I've been doing it all my life. Truth is, I'm good at many different things, but coming up with neat, original or cool ideas is not one of them.
The first time I remember being an idea stealer was back in the ninth grade when I was forced to sit and write an essay, along with everyone else in my class, to be judged and evaluated for a state competition. I sat there and thought, and thought, and thought and simply could not come up with a single thing, until... a song that I had heard recently kept running through my head and I used it as inspiration and it was game on. The result: my essay was not only chosen to go to the state championship, I won first place in the high school division. No mean feat for a lowly ninth grader.
My next vivid memory of idea stealing was while I was attending college, majoring in both History and English. The only thing I remember doing in college was reading a ton and writing even more. This was fine because writing research papers and critiques is obviously something I would be very good at, seeing as both are just my version of other peoples works. However, as an English major, I was required to take a Creative Writing class. Ugh.
I am NOT a story teller. No, no, no, no, NO! Luckily the first few assignments were fairly simple and, even luckier, some really funny things had happened to me that summer, so I had plenty of support material. Until... we had to write an original story which was to be the major weighing grade for the class. Fail this assignment and you failed the class.
So I went in search of an original story. I asked just about every single person I knew, which in college was a significant number of people, what they would write about if it was up to them. I picked their brains and toyed with their varied ideas until I came up with something I that was familiar and very me. The story from rough draft #1 to final copy is so extremely different, my teacher questioned my organizational skills. It's true, the story changed, it adapted, it was written and re-written until it was unrecognizable to anyone but me. I got an A+ on the paper and passed the class with flying colors.
Now don't take me wrong, I am by no means plagiarizing anyone's work. It just takes other people and their ideas to inspire any type of originality in me. And that is in everything that I do.
A few years later I attended culinary school. I absolutely love to cook. But if you were to ask me to come up with my own original recipe, I don't believe I could do it. I have many, many recipes that are "original" to me, but only because I do with food what I would often do with my writing. I take the idea of someone else and I tweak it to make it my own. I never follow a recipe to the "t", unless I'm baking, and even then it's rare I don't add something. Just as with my writing, when it comes to recipes I am always adding, removing, tweaking and modifying.
This concept also carries over into my love of photography. Taking pictures is something that I'm good at, something I love doing, and something that makes me happy. However, posing people or coming up with a unique idea or concept, not so much. I spend hours perusing the internet looking at the pictures that other photographers have taken and "pinning" them so that I can come back to them later for inspiration. If it is true that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then I am the worlds best flatterer.
I look at the pictures and works of other photographers and I concoct ways to do the same thing, if not something similar, but in my own way. Of course, it's imitation of someone else's genius, but the end result has my own original spin permanently imprinted upon it.
So, do I wish I could come up with the next genius organizational idea to sweep Pinterest? Or the next great award winning recipe? Or even take the next original newborn pose to rock the photography industry? Of course I do. But am I merely content to be the unoriginal copycat me who does great things with other people's ideas?
Yeah. I'm okay with that too.
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