Today’s article headline can be a bit deflating on the surface. Yet I want to shed some fresh light (pun intended) on this topic.
The truth is, everything under the sun has been done in one way or another—but has it been done your way?
Last Friday, I watched the Masterclass episode featuring Ava DuVernay, the writer and director of movies like “Selma” and “A Wrinkle In Time.” This episode of Masterclass featured DuVernay’s creation of her most recent movie, “Origin;” an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestselling book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
If you haven’t seen “Origin,” I highly recommend it. It is beautifully produced, and the story does a brilliant job shedding light on some of the obscure details of historic events, many of which I hadn’t heard before, with surprising poise despite their increduality. The movie will leave you with a lot to think about.
I bring DuVernay up because she touches on this topic of everything having already been done with an honorable and unapologetic grace. She encourages viewers to defy the naysayers and folks who tell you not to bother because it’s already been done, and even more so, calls us to challenge folks who indicate something cannot be done by actually doing the thing they assert can’t be done. She doesn’t encourage this in a rebellious tone, but in the spirit of recognizing that desire to express cannot be stifled.
For me, it’s putting our own unique spin on the things we create, since we are all creators. It’s about exploring where we can add our own vision and voice to our expressions in the world, and a nudge to continue creating even if what we want to create has already been created in another form.
Think about the physical and biological makeup of all humans. We all have eyes, a nose, mouth, cheeks, foreheads, chins, jaw, and ears—yet very few of us look anything alike!
We all have fingers and thumbs, and just like snowflakes and their unique designs, there is no duplication of fingerprints in all of humanity. Holy Batman, think about that! Over eight billion human bodies, and no overlap in our fingerprint design. That should be reason enough that today’s headline should inspire the opposite of what I indicated in the first sentence. We are so incredibly unique; therefore anything we create is unique as well.
Everything under the sun has been done. Has it been done your way?
What would be different in your life if you finally dove into creating all the things you desire to create but have been telling yourself things like, “the market is saturated with what I want to do,” or “what difference is my work going to make when there are so many people out there doing what I want to do, and doing it well?”
There is no one out there doing what you want to do with your ideas, your vision, your eyeballs, your brain, or your combination of talents and skills.
We all approach the very same things from different perspectives every single day. Today, embrace this and confidently go forth claiming, “Everything under the sun may have in fact already been done; but it hasn’t been done my way.”