What does originality mean as a core value?
Originality as a core value means doing things your own way, so that what you make and how you work are recognisably yours, and copying what others have done feels uncomfortable.
Copying doesn’t sit well with you. You like to write the speech yourself, find your own route to a result, and choose pictures for your walls that nobody else has. Being different for effect holds little appeal. What matters is that the work carries your fingerprints. You notice quickly when something is derivative, and your own derivative work bothers you even when nobody else spots it.
What does originality look like in practice?
- You avoid the obvious answer in a pitch, even when it would probably do.
- You find a fresh angle on a well-worn topic before you’ll write about it.
- You set up your workspace, home or wardrobe in a way that’s recognisably yours.
- You credit your sources carefully because you hate the idea of passing something off as your own.
- You’d rather fail with your own approach than succeed with someone else’s.
When is originality overplayed?
Insisting on your own way can mean reinventing things that were fine. You might dismiss proven methods because they’re borrowed, ignore good advice because it came from a book everyone has read, or make your work harder for others to pick up. Sometimes the conventional answer is conventional because it works. Kept in proportion, it is original where it adds something and happy to copy where it doesn’t. A useful test is to name what your version adds before you start building it.
Often confused with
Originality vs Individuality
Individuality is about you as a person standing apart. Originality is about your work and your approach carrying your own fingerprints.
Originality vs Creativity
Creativity happily builds on other people’s ideas. Originality cares that the result isn’t a copy.
Originality vs Authenticity
Authenticity is being true to yourself, even if that looks quite conventional. Originality actively avoids the well-worn path.
Questions to sit with
- Where are you reinventing something that a standard approach would handle perfectly well?
- Which piece of your work feels most unmistakably yours, and why?
- When did you last take good advice even though it wasn’t your own idea?
More values in Creation
Making things that didn’t exist before.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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