Recently I was told a quote from Keith Johnstone that said, "People trying to be original always arrive at the same boring old answers. Ask people to give you an original idea and see the chaos it throws them into. If they said the first thing that came into their head, there’d be no problem." I thought about this quote for some time and tried to understand what he was trying to say. After some deep thought on the subject, I came to the idea that Johnstone is trying to say that in our pursuit of trying to be original, we eventually try so hard that we subconsciously think an ordinary idea is original. Though this may sound very confusing when first read, I agree with Johnstone completely. In the past, when I have been given the task of coming up with an original idea, I find myself overthinking things. More times that not, stating the first thing that comes to mind is more original that an idea that you have thought about for hours.
At first, when I read this statement I thought it didn't make much sense, but as I thought about it deeper, I realized that in the past I have been a victim of over thinking. Subconscious thoughts are always playing factors in every decision we make. Even when we feel like no thought is going into a decision, it is. If you think long enough about something, these subconscious thoughts begin to play a factor in your mind, and they can be traced back to anything you've seen or known in the past. Lets use Coca-Cola as an example. You are given the task of creating a new and completely original ad for the upcoming Super Bowl. You begin thinking and as you open up your mind, you're being influenced by every ad you have ever seen for Coke. This can be traced back to when you were a child, watching TV on Saturday morning and an ad for Coke comes on TV. The thing that many people don't realize is that anything that we have ever experienced is subconsciously stored in our mind. So when thinking of this new ad, you are thinking of all these great ideas that you feel are original but are in fact, very similar to an ad that you've seen in the past but that you have loved. So when Johnstone says that if we said the thing that first comes to mind there would be no problem, he's right. Not giving your mind time to find those thoughts deep down is more beneficial than spending a lot of time thinking about it.
What do you think this statement means?
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