"The fact is that these ideas, when they are truly original, become landmarks, forever impacting our way of understanding the past, living the present, and most importantly, imagining the future. Because from them, new possibilities open up."

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Audio Article by Fred Gelli for Fast Company

The date was May 19, 1967. The location, the Brian Epstein Saville Theatre in London.

Speculation in the press suggested that something truly new would be presented to the world, something that would surprise even the biggest fans of the most famous band of all time.

“Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” by the Beatles, not only fulfilled its promise but remains considered one of the 10 most important albums in the history of music. It won two Grammys, was an instant public success, and influenced not only music from then on, but also art, fashion, and culture.

In a way, it's fair to say that this creative explosion—which featured completely revolutionary recording techniques, instruments never before used in pop music such as sitars and tablas, and an iconic cover designed by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake—became a timeless masterpiece and changed the world.

What does an idea need to change the world? What makes people able to metabolize ingredients that are already here—seven musical notes, 118 chemical elements in the periodic table, and a good handful of words—in a completely new way? What is truly original, what surprises, shocks, dismantles patterns, breaks rules?

It could be a song, a scientific theory, an artistic manifesto, or a revolution. The fact is that these ideas, when truly original, become milestones, forever impacting how we understand the past, live the present, and, most importantly, imagine the future. Because from them, new possibilities open up.

What do Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Marie Curie, Igor Stravinsky, Santos Dumont, Tarsila do Amaral, Mahatma Gandhi, Carolina Maria de Jesus, and Pelé have in common?

It seems that first, they were always more willing to take risks, experimenting more, both technically, but also culturally and socially, breaking established rules and paradigms.

At the same time, they seem to have had the ability to catalyze the latent forces of their time. What was already in the air and no one had managed to channel until then. They weren't just recombining what had already been done before. They weren't clinging to the safe place, to what had already worked. They bet on the new.

But, above all, it seems that they all managed to create something truly original precisely because they had the courage to remain connected to their origins, respecting what was particular to them in their trajectories and drawing from there the inputs to propose the new.

Steve Jobs created Apple's differentiators from his life experiences, including the fact that he was adopted, his trip to India, and his interest in calligraphy. Frida Kahlo, in her revolutionary artistic approach, basically exposes the scars of an intense life, marked by a serious accident in her youth, which made her delve into her inner self and share it with the world. None of them were trying to imitate anyone.

They were, indeed, giving vent to their deepest beliefs, shaped by their origins, their limitations, and their talents. Probably achieving an extra level of contact with their origins, with what truly defined them. It seems obvious, but it isn't.

It's very common to believe that, in an increasingly competitive world, we'll have a better chance of standing out if we follow proven models of success, copying successful competitors, or even denying our origins in favor of idealized references, whether for an individual or a company. This reflection applies to both.

Companies are a group of people who put their essential skills at the service of common goals. They will be more or less original to the extent that they can have absolute clarity about their origins, about the reason why they exist and have prospered so far.

At this point, the next step is to seek a reinterpretation of that origin in light of the new demands of the world. From this encounter arises the space for truly original ideas to emerge.

In English, the word "origin" is contained within "originality". An overlap that is inspiring us due to the celebration of Tátil's 35th anniversary. Tátil is a branding and design consultancy that stems from my origins as a design student in 1989, absolutely enthusiastic about the idea of ​​nature as a powerful source of inspiration for thinking about innovation. All our efforts to bring original ideas into the world throughout this time emerge from this origin and open space for this reflection I am making now.

The fact is that, without truly original ideas and solutions, we will hardly be able to build desirable futures for ourselves as a species and for everything else that exists alive on this incredible planet.

For now, I fear that we are compromising part of our capacity to have these fresh and revolutionary ideas as we have outsourced two of the essential skills that make us a fundamentally creative species: intuition and imagination.

As I have already discussed in other articles, algorithms and, more recently, generative artificial intelligence are gaining ground in the way we decide and create. With this, new generations, especially digital natives, risk having these ancestral skills atrophied, because the brain, obsessed with economy as it is, understands that what is not being used does not deserve to receive energy.

And worse, this is happening precisely when they will need them most, as they are inheriting a gigantic hot potato with the inevitable social and climate issues on the horizon, not to mention wars, the systemic crisis of democracy and capitalism.

Imagining the new will be practically a prerequisite for our survival. The problem is that it seems we are betting all our chips on artificial intelligence as the Holy Grail of innovation with its instantaneous answers, delivering maximum productivity and, in the creative area, doing in seconds the work that dozens of people would take days to do.

And that's where the danger lies. Everything that AIs offer us, for now, has to do with what they see in the rearview mirror based on their capacity to metabolize all human production up to this point.

Things get even more complicated when, having practically devoured all available content in the last 18 months, they now begin to feed on their own production, becoming self-referential and, consequently, even more homogeneous in their aesthetics and highly recognizable styles.

This applies to images and videos, but also to texts, in which arguments full of conviction, even if mistaken, simply apologize for the error when confronted and move on to the next challenge.

We risk seeing our cultural, intellectual, and expressive production turning into a large creative instant noodle in its seemingly tasty mediocrity.

Far be it from me to deny the power of artificial intelligence and its role in innovation processes with its infinite capacity for analyzing large volumes of data or even simulating and modeling complex scenarios.

My provocation has been that we cannot allow our natural intelligence, the one that brought us this far and which is even responsible for the invention of AI tools, to be emptied of its relevance, at the risk that, without it and all its sophisticated synapse-based system, we will cease to be the ones in control and become controlled.

article from Fred Gelli's column for Fast Company Brasil: The value of what is truly original and the creative instant noodle.

Read the text on Fast Company Brasil's website: