Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Originality ensues, it can't be chased
Two pots of water
Picture two identical pots of room temperature water, one on the counter and one on a hot stove. For a few minutes they look the same, with no visible change. Then the pot on the stove boils over while the other stays as it was. The water on the stove was changing steadily the whole time, but nothing showed until it reached its boiling point.
Work on the road to originality behaves like that water. The effort compounds invisibly while it looks entirely unoriginal, and months, years, or even decades may pass before the divergence appears. Once it does, it is hard to imagine the two pots were ever alike.
Frankl and originality
Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be pursued and must ensue, and perhaps the same applies to originality. Maybe it is a byproduct of willingness to sit with the discomfort of feeling unoriginal, and tolerance for that feeling is what sows the seeds of the eventual original work.
Checking the direction
None of this is a case for blind persistence. Feeling like the work is derivative is normal, and the boring derivative work is where the singular work begins. What deserves checking is whether the platform chosen is sending the bus in the direction of the life wanted, since direction matters more than speed. The specific bus line matters less, because the line is shaped by the person still riding it.
Why does water seem unchanged before it boils?
Water on a hot stove warms steadily, but the change is hard to see until bubbles begin to form. At sea level it reaches 100 degrees Celsius, and at that point the added heat goes into turning liquid into vapor, which produces the rolling bubbles. The energy needed to vaporize a gram of water is about five times what it takes to heat that gram from freezing to boiling. The visible event comes at the end of a long, steady buildup.
What did Viktor Frankl mean by happiness must ensue?
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps, wrote this in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning. His argument was that happiness arrives as a side effect of dedicating oneself to a cause greater than oneself or to another person. He held that making happiness a direct target pushes it further away. He called the pursuit of it a form of self-defeating attention, and he built his school of therapy, logotherapy, around the search for meaning.
Why does progress stay invisible for so long?
Compounding processes grow in proportion to what already exists, so the early gains are tiny in absolute terms. A quantity growing at seven percent a year takes about ten years to double, but it then doubles again in the next ten, and the second doubling adds as much as the whole first decade. Biologists see the same shape in bacteria, which seem absent from a petri dish for hours before the colony becomes visible. The curve looks flat on the left because the starting amount is small.