How weird is that?

Murphy

Your right, ideas come from what we experience. The more you expose yourself to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new cultures, the more creative you will become and the better ideas you will produce.

I recall a fascinating point from Jared Diamond’s great book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It charts how the different cultures and geographic regions evolved over the centuries.
One example is the Spanish Conquistadors who conqured the South American Mayan and Incan cultures. The Spanish had fought, traded with and been exposed to neighboring cultures and nations for centuries, they had continual access to new ideas from all across Europe. The South American’s had far less exposure to new ideas and were nowhere near as sophisticated.

Another interesting way to view ideas is to see them as evolving or mutating. Look at how cell phones have mutated from the bricks people carried once upon a time to the tiny multimedia devices they are today. Each designer and company makes new tweaks to the idea, someone adds a color screen, smaller battery, better operating system, cameras, SMS, MMS, WiFI, etc. It keeps going and until we forget, not that long ago phones only came with a cord. Our grandparents lived in a time when they didn’t even have phones.

If you think about it most of our ideas come from something we have experienced. We base our thoughts around things we know. For example, if you never knew anything about a cell phone then you couldn’t get an idea about it. Perhaps you know about things that are similar, like regular phones, but you won’t get an idea if you don’t have the knowledge. So in essence we all plagiarize but in different degrees. You produce ideas based on your experiences. A native that never experiences modern inventions isn’t going to have an idea about a new rocket fuel, but someone that has knowledge of existing projects will be able to improve on them with ‘new’ ideas.

I guess the best way to be creative is to experience and learn more.