Most people I know create wholly new ideas from other ideas that came before – a remix or combination that no one thought to put together before. Humans don’t live in a vacuum: we are influenced by other people, times and places, both in very recent history but also in the course of our whole lives. We bring something unique to our ideas because of our individual life journey, our physiology, co-ordination, beliefs, and values.
It’s virtually impossible to make something completely devoid of any outside influence because to make something that hasn’t existed before, we need to know what’s existed before (and not make that).
It follows then, that the fastest path to originality is simply to make and continue to make, one piece after another. If one makes enough, we eventually override the level of influence of external ideas and we begin to create new ideas from our own ideas. Outside influence is replaced by Inside Influence and that creates the condition for something entirely new.