Originality from seeing things through your unique prism

As you can see from my website tommccallum.com, I work with clients who are already successful yet hungry and open, seeking to bravely make an even more meaningful impact. Sometimes i call my role helping to “polish the diamond”, to support them on their journey from good to great to elite. Another way I express this is that the role is to help them look through the prism slightly differently. Even turning the view a tiny fraction can make a huge difference.

This brings me to the podcast Sideways, by Matthew Syed, author of Black Box Thinking, who was mortified to hear that he may have accidentally been guilty of plagiarism when his literary agent found that an article in the New Statesman, published before his book, was almost the same as the first two chapters of that book.

As it turned out, he had drafted those chapters before the article came out, so he was instantly absolved. The podcast, then, moves into talking about how: “our brains are wired for unoriginality, we evolve as a collective brain, absorbing our shared cultural cues and looking for what has worked in the past.”

Interesting, but even more so was when he then interviewed the author of the New Stateman piece, Ian Leslie about originality. Since that episode in 2014, Ian has reframed this term and he see that we are all informed by…