Originality

Mark Twain wrote in “Innocents Abroad”, 1869, ch. 26: To give birth to an idea – to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which all other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.