Original Thinking

What does it mean to have "original thinking"?

In the modern world, originality is hard to come by. We have information from everyone, everywhere, all at once, from all time.

Originality arises when you take time to synthesizes your experience & knowledge into creations; expressing of the self.

Each of us, each self, has a unique way of looking at the world. Perspective. We can either use that perspective to mimic the expressions of others, or we can do our best to synthesize novelty.

Bloom's Taxonomy

One of the most well-known ways to consider original thinking is to view Bloom's Taxonomy:

Bloom's taxonomy walks through the progression of novelty/originality.

As you can see, the base of the pyramid is "remembering". Unfortunately, with the Information Overload we experience in modern society, it is hard to remember most of the information we consume, let alone move to the next phase of "understanding".

Creating a Second Brain, like Obsidian, enables the offloading of responsibility of remembering each piece of information we consume. We can augment our human brains by using a second one, a digital one, with perfect recall.

Effectively, offloading the need to remember everything allows us to level up to focus more on understanding how to apply the information, rather than merely remembering. Action leads to Wisdom.

Action leads to impact, which returns data that we can then analyze, enabling further connection between information we've already consumed, helping us to forge knowledge.

Over time, we begin to identify patterns in our own actions that cause us to evaluate future actions, again furthering wisdom. This evaluation relates to Metacognition.

Finally, we get to the top, the synthesize of the entire pyramid: originality. By understanding what we've remembered enough to analyze and evaluate its application and impact on the world, we derive unique insights that can lead to true creation. We can connect the dots between our thoughts enough to synergistically elevate them to serendipitous moments of creation.

People think that originality is something innate, and, while that may be true in some circumstances, most novelty is the result of careful analysis of the patterns of the world, both internal and external, to the point where someone gains a different perspective. Expression that new perspective gives the perception of originality.

Connecting Originality