This is a weird one. Years ago I made a joke about the ultimate Easter breakfast. Dippy egg and soldiers, but the egg is a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and the soldiers are Cadbury’s Fingers.
I talked about it to quite a few people, actually. Then, a couple of years later I think, it showed up in the shops.
No, I’m not saying someone at Cadbury’s heard my idea. I think that idea just showed up for somebody else too. And to be honest, it’s one I probably wouldn’t have made happen anyway.
Emerson saw this coming in 1841
I’ve been reading Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance, and there’s a passage in it that took me straight back to that chocolate egg.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)
That last line is my favourite part. Our own rejected thoughts, coming back to us with “a certain alienated majesty”. The idea we parked, now wearing somebody else’s name and suddenly looking brilliant.
How many ideas do we park?
My Creme Egg moment is a daft one, and it really doesn’t matter that I never did anything with it. But it does make me ask a bigger question. How many little ideas are there that we park, and then they show up somewhere else and we feel like it’s too late?
Emerson’s answer is uncomfortable. We dismiss a thought for one reason: because it’s ours. It came too easily, so we assume it can’t be worth much. We decide it’s obvious, or that somebody must have said it better already.
I said something on my podcast, Your Best Year Starts Here, a while back that I think sits underneath all of this: “We’ve let our past experiences, and the stories, and the things other people have told us say we can’t do stuff.” Quite often a rejected thought has an old story behind it.
Catch it before you dismiss it
Years in front of clients and on stage have given me things to say that nobody else can say in quite the same way. You’ll have your own version of that. The trick is noticing the gleam before you wave it away.
It’s worth asking yourself: which idea did you dismiss, then watch someone else run with? And which one keeps coming back?
