Creating an unreplicable inspiration pool

It’s true that our greatest currency in this world is our originality, but the pressure to constantly generate out original material, day after day, without plagiarizing, can overwhelm even the most prolific creator.

Finding, expressing and becoming known for your authentic voice is no easy task.

Henri, the great realism painter and teacher, addresses this issues his book on the artist’s spirit:

Don’t bother about your originality, let yourself just as free as you can, and your originality will take care of you.

Easier said than done. It’s not like you can just flip the switch of freedom and suddenly create remarkable, game changing work.

Like any other part of the creative process, you need a system. Originality doesn’t materialized sporadically, but systematically. A tool to try here is uniqueness filtering, which is focusing on and differentiating your work through the little worlds you investigate to a great, high level. Taking something that fascinates and ignites you and using that to drive your originality.

Yoga accomplished that for me. It started out as a rehabilitation for my collapsed lung. But after falling in love with this practice, it soon grew into a fixture in my creative work. Yoga started to become a metaphor for different areas of my life, from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual to the sexual to the social.

Practicing every day flooded my palette with all these unique experiences to mine, through which exciting material filtered.

Find your version of that, and not only will you never run out of original ideas, but you create an unreplicable inspiration pool.

Linklater, the philosopher disguised as a filmmaker, once said that he chooses his film projects based around his own formula. If anyone can do it, then he shouldn’t.

That’s a uniqueness filter as well. Each of us can apply this kind of filter to our own lives. We simply need a mantra, question or ritual superimposed over our work that paints us into an original corner.

One you might ask yourself is, how could you become so identified with your work that nobody could steal it, and if they did, people would notice?

Tools like these can help relieve the pressure to constantly generate original material.

It’s all about the way you frame and filter your experiences.

You don’t even have to do things differently, you just need to approach them with a different mindset.

How will you find your authentic voice and say something original?