Originality is a remix when you collect with taste

Great work almost never appears from thin air. It comes from a steady stream of inputs you’ve sifted, labeled, and kept close. Think of a photographer’s contact sheet or a chef’s spice rack. When the shelves hold good ingredients, new dishes come easier. When they’re full of stale, mismatched stuff, everything tastes the same. The difference isn’t genius, it’s curation, and curation is a skill you can practice.

Selective collecting beats random hoarding. A swipe file is simply a place where you put things worth stealing, along with a note about why they matter. The why is crucial. It turns passive consumption into active study. One designer I know keeps a phone album called “Micro-Layouts.” During a commute, they save tiny interface patterns they love and tag each one with the problem it solves. Months later, that album helps them ship cleaner designs in hours, not days.

Remix is where taste meets action. Pick three items that don’t seem to belong together, then force them into a single sketch, paragraph, or slide. Last Tuesday, I grabbed a sentence about river currents, a photo of cracked paint, and a note on customer churn. Fifteen minutes later, I had a visual metaphor for a retention review deck: currents, eddies, and leak points. It wasn’t perfect, but it was specific. And specific beats vague every time.

Behind this practice sits combinatorial creativity, a well-studied idea that novel outputs come from unusual combinations of familiar inputs. Memory improves when you encode why something matters, not just what it is. And selective exposure changes your default options. I might be wrong, but most “creative blocks” are actually input problems. Upgrade your inputs, label why they matter, and you’ll have more raw material to recombine on demand.

Start by creating one capture bucket you’ll actually use, digital or paper, and throw today’s sparks into it as they come. Every time you save an item, add two tags—the source and a short why—it-matters line so your future self has context. Protect a 20‑minute weekly taste upgrade where you prune weak items and add better ones from books, galleries, or long-form pieces. Then pick three unrelated items and give yourself 30 minutes to make a quick mashup, no polishing, just a sketch that proves the pieces can talk to each other. Do this once this week and watch how much easier ideas flow. Give it a try tonight.