The Originality Myth
Some of us can afford to be quietly dependable. Enough years of maintaining that reputation and the promotion materializes, the board celebrates, the stakeholders thank you for your diligent service. For the rest of us, it is an often cut throat world. Where the contender with the most conquests takes all. Underrecognized leaders are almost always tossed onto this side of the equation. That’s the quiet part being said out loud. So, in order to win, we reach for any advantage our resources and values will allow us to claim. Enter the Originality Myth…
We all know success in the attention economy is predicated on the originality of your idea, work or brand. The problem? That’s total b.s. As an expert on the science of visibility and influence, people tend to ask me a lot of questions about amplifying reach and securing the attention and recognition their important work deserves. Often, it’s phrased as a “standing out on social media” question. Or it’s wrapped up in a question about consistency which is disguised as a sustainability question.
But at the end of the day, every one of these people are struggling to show up in a way that works. Why?
It’s because we believe the originality myth: This thing isn’t worth saying unless it’s novel, interesting or new.
The truth? Folks are adopting an increasingly impossible to maintain standard. One that TPTB (the platforms that be) rely on.
I’m about to bust that ish wide open (in a super unoriginal way)
A New Standard
Let’s face it. Your idea is probably not original or truly novel. I know that stings. But it’s also true.
It’s something I have to remind myself of regularly.
Here’s the great news: it doesn’t have to be. Truly. It doesn’t have to be new. Or genius.
It only needs to be influential.
Sounds easier said than done. But as it turns out, it’s really not super complicated.
First thing’s first: the standard. What is an influential idea?
My current working definition is that it’s an idea that’s regularly able to gain, maintain and translate the attention of the right people. Within the right scope of influence and at the right scale [1].
And how do we get an idea to gain, maintain and translate the attention of others predictably?
Well ideally, the idea should be fascinating.
Fascinating
At first blush, it absolutely sounds like I’m going back on what I said, but hear me out. The idea doesn’t need to be new. But it does need to be memorable. That’s the minimum viable.
Somewhere along the way “memorable” became “original” and here we are.
It seems obvious when you read it in bald text, but there are lots of different ways for a thing to be memorable. Being original is certainly one of them. Being truly original is something that will get you past the brain’s increasingly vigilant filters, no sweat. But it’s also an insane standard to even attempt to maintain. It’s nowhere near sustainable.
Others have sought to answer this challenge, by going in the opposite direction. Dropping any real effort at all and instead focusing on being their most bombastic selves.
That’s certainly another way to be memorable.
Unfortunately, this runs into another problem: the associative nature of our memories[2]. This approach may be able to gain and even in some extreme cases maintain attention. But translating that attention? This approach rarely accomplishes that.
And when it does, it rarely lasts.
Afterall, a memory that we’ve sown for utility purposes is only useful if it can be remembered in the right circumstances. The bombastic approach usually gets your memory stored in places not at all associated with the chain of behaviors you’re looking to influence.
So, if we have high effort originality on one extreme of the spectrum and low effort bombast on the other, where should we fall? What does it look like to strike the right balance?
The idea needs to be the right kind of memorable. And that’s where fascination comes in.
What was the last idea you truly found fascinating?
For me it was a conversation I had with my friend and neuroscientist Kendall Braun.
I’d pinged her to confirm something I’d read: that dopamine is not really connected to pleasure. But rather, it’s associated with prediction, association and learning. Now you might read this and think the concept is interesting. But I found it fascinating.
Why?
Because it addressed a key motive of mine. My livelihood is predicated on knowledge about details like these. The key here? Fascination is based on motivation. You’re unlikely to be interested in something that addresses none of your motivations. You’re even less likely to be fascinated.
Significant
The bare minimum for fascination is addressing a motivation.
But there are degrees of fascination all the way from mild intrigue to ardent obsession. How fascinating must our ideas be in order to strike the aforementioned right balance? Significantly so. And that’s not an arbitrary turn of phrase. It’s an actual assessment of how context specific (read: relevant) this fascination needs to be.
That’s right. While motive determines whether or not a thing is fascinating. Context determines the depth of that fascination.
What one considers significantly fascinating is context dependent.
For example, I might find the aromachemical Ambrofix incredibly fascinating. And as I am an amateur, hobbyist perfumer that tracks, since it’s connected to a key motivation. But if my snowboard is about to send me hurtling headlong into a duckline of toddlers, my ardor will absolutely cool.
The sustainability question may be coming up for you at this point. There are infinitely many contexts. So how is it possible to pursue context specificity sustainably? Wasn’t sustainability the issue with the originality myth in the first place?
That’s a fair concern to have.
Here’s what I’ll say to that: There may be infinitely many contexts, but they all fall into one of three overarching categories. So for all intents and purposes, there are only three contexts a person or group we are looking to gain, maintain and translate the attention of would fall into. I codify these three context groups in a framework I developed called the Market Lenses.
On the other hand, originality is literally a moving target. By definition it does not retread old stomping grounds.
So where does that leave us?
Instead of chasing originality, consider this instead: all you need to do is to gain, maintain and translate the attention of others. That’s what an influential idea does. An influential idea doesn’t need to be original. And it doesn’t need to be bombastic either. Instead all you need is an idea that is significantly fascinating–or said another way, one that addresses a key (context specific and relevant) motivation.
At the end of the day, your work doesn’t need to be original to succeed. It needs to be influential. And influence has never been an accident–it has always been engineered.
Curious about the 3 Market Lenses?
They’re step 4 of 5 in my Matters Most Analysis—a tool I use with my clients to identify core motivational drivers. That way you know what to say, how to say it, and why it lands—so you never waste time pitching the wrong message to the wrong mindset. And the Matters Most Analysis is just a tiny part of my Visibility Catalyst Program.
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[1] Hale, C. (2025) ‘Why We Need to Compete with the Status Quo (Instead of Each Other) with N. Chloé Nwangwu’, Doing it for the Attention. Available at: https://fortheattention.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-compete-with-the-status.
[2] Nwangwu, N.C. (2024) ‘Winning the Mind War: Why being different, is a losing game.’, NobiWorks, 5 December. Available at: https://www.nobiworks.com/codex/winning-the-mind-war.