There are no new colors

There are no new colors, but new works of art are being painted everyday.

There are no new notes, but new music is being composed everyday.

There are no new letters of the alphabet, but new stories are being written everyday.

These realizations lead me to the conclusion that there are no new ideas — just new combinations of ideas.

Kirby Ferguson puts it another way: Everything is a Remix.

If you think about it, it’s how we all played when we were kids.  We took pots and pans from the kitchen and reimagined them drum sets, we took hundreds of plastic blocks and combined them to make castles, we took Play-Doh and reshaped it into animals, and we took crayons and paper and turned them into whole worlds. It didn’t matter if there were the big fat box of eight crayons or the really big box of 64 colors (you know, the one with the sharpener in the back!) our imagination and creativity were not limited by the number of crayons in the box.

What basic ideas are you taking and using as building blocks to combine (and recombine) into bigger and better ideas that other people can then use to create even bigger and better ideas from those new (new-ish) building blocks.