You Only Have Six Original Thoughts in Your Life

By an original thought, I mean putting together existing ideas and observations and coming up with a new thought or product or process that you’ve never met before.

All developments are constructed from the raw materials of our present knowledge, and new discoveries are often made independently by a number of people. There are many examples of such duplications such as the point-contact transistor, protein denaturation and calculus.

There is a huge range of creativity, from very little for some people all the way to thousands of ideas from someone like Richard Feynman; six is just a guesstimate for the average, taken from my personal experience.

It follows that nearly all of your beliefs, whether big or small, are those of other people:

• What is consciousness?
• Is there a God?
• How should society be organized?
• Does this hat look good on me?

Just because those beliefs didn’t originate with you doesn’t make your answers invalid, of course, but it does place on you an obligation to look into the basis for your beliefs.