Is not about doing something never been done before. Feels more like doing something that can be sold, because else there could be legal problems, competition, captive markets and so on. That is about the current state of the world, not yourself.
You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.
I started building something pretty obscure about 14 years ago; https://socketcluster.io/ an open source, WebSocket-based RPC + pub/sub library with a focus on in-order async stream-processing with backpressure monitoring.
It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to multiple processes.
It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for most application logic and people are still not using queues where they should be. People think of queues as some expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the benefits.
Throwing yourself at something that's never been done is fun.
But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
> So if you want to truly do something that no one has done before, do something obscure, do something time-consuming, do something difficult, and do something that has unknowns you’ll only resolve once you complete the first bits.
This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something valuable that's original.
I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle, and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components. Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.
But are those worthwhile projects? I suppose there's only one way to find out.
Yeah, that's the main challenge in research. Once you get immersed in an area, it's not that hard to come up with ideas that haven't been done before. It's also not that hard to do things that improve the performance of some method or system, at least by a little. It can be fairly hard to do things that are both novel and actually useful.
I never found myself in fear that I’m doing something unoriginal. However, I do find myself worrying I'm doing something a better resourced competitor is also working on.
Most things worth doing are actually quite obvious. The determining factor in success is execution, not originality.
On the other hand, after reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, you realize that as far as narratives go there’s nothing new. It’s all been done to death, remixed and rehashed for millennia. The great Ovid probably lifted ideas and tropes from somewhere else.
Yet all those stories in all their forms still sell today, and still impress people.
Not worrying about unoriginality frees you to just enjoy yourself… and just maybe do something original.
I wonder whether we get more satisfaction from chasing things that no one has ever done or will ever attempt again or, whether we build a more satisfactory legacy of accomplishments by attempting things that we ourselves have never done, even if lots of other people have done those things.
Would I rather reminisce in my old age about all the things that I could've done that would've set me apart from all of my peers or spend my old age in a constant brag about all the fun I had, completely satisfied because I had chosen activities and challenged myself to succeed at building skills and experiences that made my own life interesting and challenged me mentally or physically.
Don't strive to be original. Pursue other goals and the originality will emerge naturally. Accept that it won't be yours because your role is a supporting actor.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.8 ms ] threadYou can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.
It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to multiple processes.
It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for most application logic and people are still not using queues where they should be. People think of queues as some expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the benefits.
But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something valuable that's original.
I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle, and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components. Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.
But are those worthwhile projects? I suppose there's only one way to find out.
(I'd give that symphonic cycle a listen though).
Yet all those stories in all their forms still sell today, and still impress people.
Not worrying about unoriginality frees you to just enjoy yourself… and just maybe do something original.
You will produce a completely unique page.
Would I rather reminisce in my old age about all the things that I could've done that would've set me apart from all of my peers or spend my old age in a constant brag about all the fun I had, completely satisfied because I had chosen activities and challenged myself to succeed at building skills and experiences that made my own life interesting and challenged me mentally or physically.