Learn Before You Leap
You can recycle something but it's still trash
If you are going to make a living being a creative and be any good at it, you are going to need a handful of non-creative talents; one of them is being able to walk and even stand still when everyone else is running.
Imagine if you owned a library and kept a single copy of every book that came out. It wouldn’t take long before you’re library was packed, shit just stacked up in the corner, filling up shelves twice as fast as you could build them. But how many of those books are worth the paper they are printed on? Damn few. And what about the GREAT ones? The Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s – do they get special treatment? A Shelf of Honor? Even the Great Names weren’t always at the apogee of written wisdom; sometimes they penned garbage. As Curator in Chief, you have to be damn quick at culling this literary operation before the gears get jammed and whole machine blows up. The trick to turning this library into a useful room of reference is to get real personal.
Everyone likes Salinger. You don’t? Trash it.
Something Roth wrote speaks to you? Front shelf, easy to get it.
That ability to stop and take a critical eye to things, to look at what Glaser or Vignelli made and to form an original opinion, that is where the schism between creative and copycat begins. The idea of being a creative is sexy to a lot of people; especially to those who aren’t creative in the least. They stockpile books and bookmarks with the pseudonym “Inspiration.” However, often they are far from inspired, following in the footsteps of D.B. Cooper, not M.C. Escher. This sort of “swap the colors and images and call it new” mentality can build a business. It can even find success. But it will never be successful – and it sure as shit isn’t creative. True creativity is individual and is the product of raw inspiration executed in a unique way from a subject that was treated thoughtfully. Meanwhile, the “inspired” folks are hitting copy and paste on What’s Next.