I’m not original and that’s ok

If you’re reading this, you should know that it’s not original.

Oh, I wrote it myself. Everything I’m saying does come from my own observations. What I write about are usually patterns I notice as I do business, and am immersed in the lifestyle of that. I especially try to recognize the fundamentals…the “core” of things, if you will.

None of that means that I’m the first guy to have said any of it though.

I built a start-up program once, which I called Foundation. The major inspiration for the name was it’s basis in what I found to be fundamentals of doing business..but fundamentals are necessarily things that have made it through the gauntlet of time.

Something “fundamental” has been proven to remain the same, no matter what changes around it. Other things are concluded based on the fundamentals. So if there are fundamentals that exist, it means someone else has not only thought about it before, they’ve likely beaten it down to the core before we ever got there.

Which really means that whatever it is we talk about, someone else has talked about it before.

Someone else has had an opinion on our topic already, and they may have been smarter. They probably were smarter. Likely, someone more experienced, more mature, more capable, more accurate, more graceful, or more wise has spoken before about whatever it is you’re about to speak on.

That can be very intimidating: to know that giants of business may have simply passed on their chance to write the books that we dream about writing. To say the things we dream of saying, because it was so obvious to them, because they chatted about it all the time already.

Or worse, to know that those same giants have spoken on the topic already.

We could feel intimidated by the idea that we’re not the first.

Personally, I am intimidated by that idea.

To deal with that, I try to remember…if all those people have said all that stuff, then I can say it too.

And, people grow. People become focused on other things as they grow. But every new generation needs these same fundamental things said to them. Every older generation needs to be reminded of why and how they built and said what they did.

So, don’t be worried about what everyone else is saying. It’s OK if you’re talking about things that other people have talked about.

You don’t need to be original. If what you’re saying had value then, it’s worth saying saying again.