Are you actually building something new?

“Go back to the basics.”

“Build from the ground up.”

“Start from the beginning.”

In our modern world of highly disposable companies, services and products, phrases like these have found themselves used at an all time high — just watch any video with Jony Ive talking about how they just remade the exact same phone from last year “from the ground up”. But why do we believe that we’re constantly building something brand new?

What is it that makes these phrases so sexy for people to use? Why is our culture so hell bent on constantly building from zero? Has it become so important for people to be recognized as founders rather than contributors? Maybe it’s necessary to do that to make people feel that need to buy more things because each thing is “brand new”.

Our ego and need to consume have rendered the much more sustainable virtues of building upon the works of others, extremely unsexy

How about:

“Thanks to the work of many, we’ve been able to craft this.”

“What you hold today is the best iteration of many before it.”

“Because we didn’t need to go back to the beginning, we’ve been able to achieve this with unprecedented efficiency.”

There are other impressive and admirable attributes which do not stem from uniqueness, novelty, ownership and stark innovation.

Perhaps converting our thinking to these qualities will help alleviate our youths ego problem. Perhaps admitting that mostly everything is a remix of something that came before it, may decrease the need to constantly sell and buy these “new” things.

This post is inspired by the fantastic Everything is a Remix documentary by Kirby Ferguson but not sponsored by it.

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