Inspiration

I’ve been thinking a lot about where ideas come from, especially in technical work.

My relationship with creative output is quite peculiar. It’s never felt natural to me to create something from “zero to one”. I’ve always found more truth in shaping and refining what already exists. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun.

I came across Eliot’s line, in which the quote “bad artists copy, good artists steal” was paraphrased from:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

To me, that quote captures the essence of the creative process. Drawing into what sparks our curiosity, combining them with our personal experiences and references, and slowly reinterpreting them into something that feels like our own.