Doing something that’s never been done before (2025)
talglobus.com> So if you want to truly do something that no one has done before, do something obscure, do something time-consuming, do something difficult, and do something that has unknowns you’ll only resolve once you complete the first bits.
This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something valuable that's original.
I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle, and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components. Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.
But are those worthwhile projects? I suppose there's only one way to find out.
Actually knitting pasta sounds pretty worthwhile.
I want lasagna in which the sheets are actually knitted linguini. I think this novelty would be worthwhile. But would the Italians ever forgive me?
Woven would be much much easier.
I'm not Italian but I would help you eat it if you made a large enough batch. I'll bring the olive bread and herbed dipping oils.
Yeah, that's the main challenge in research. Once you get immersed in an area, it's not that hard to come up with ideas that haven't been done before. It's also not that hard to do things that improve the performance of some method or system, at least by a little. It can be fairly hard to do things that are both novel and actually useful.
(I'd give that symphonic cycle a listen though).
Throwing yourself at something that's never been done is fun.
But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
This was the secret sauce of my best startup idea: something that once existed, but had been forgotten.
(Because, I believe, either the flood of people into the market space never knew it, or it wasn't the dominant model for exploitation of the user base.)
Any examples?
For example, the project I’m working on today…
People have made orreries (rotating solar system models) for centuries.
I’m designing a digital version with over 600 LEDs. It’s a massive challenge and I’m pretty sure I’ll be the first.
I’ve been making things like it for years:
Https://digitalhorology.com
Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:
It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.
That is more a black hole, thanks!
yes, our work with applying logical models of nondual systems like Advaita Vedānta, Daoism, Dzogchen as remedies for hallucination, sycophancy, adversarial instability and false continuity in AI systems is pretty unique and obscure.
Emulator?
On the other hand, after reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, you realize that as far as narratives go there’s nothing new. It’s all been done to death, remixed and rehashed for millennia. The great Ovid probably lifted ideas and tropes from somewhere else.
Yet all those stories in all their forms still sell today, and still impress people.
Not worrying about unoriginality frees you to just enjoy yourself… and just maybe do something original.
Is not about doing something never been done before. Feels more like doing something that can be sold, because else there could be legal problems, competition, captive markets and so on. That is about the current state of the world, not yourself.
You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.
What do you mean by "is not about...?" The article is precisely about that. If you don't like what the article is about, go write your own? Weird take, buddy.
I think gmuslera is right to point out that being the first doesn't really matter (for most people). You also need support from the right kinds of people and it's not a given that being first and eventually being 'proven right' (which is itself highly subjective and contested) translates to the right kinds of people automatically gravitating to your idea and helping you to make a living out of it. There are many great innovations which stayed in the shadows long after the death of their creators. Many were never given due credit.
Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.
It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.
> It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.
That's a real issue. In the US today, you have to get to a minimum viable product early and find someone to throw money at it to make it scale fast. Things that take years to make work at all are hard to fund, even at a modest level. Xerography and color TV are technologies that took decades to make work at all.
This is partly the effect of a weakened patent system.
One of the important functions of a government is to act as a backstop for capital-intensive investments with long-term ROIs. The interstate highway system started as Eisenhower's proposal, GPS and the moon mission were funded to one-up the Soviets, Arpanet/Internet was a DoD brainchild, and so on. All of that was enabled by Congresspeople who were willing to carve out a good chunk of the federal budget for large-scale, high-risk, long-tail-reward projects. That sort of thinking has not existed in Congress for some time (least of all during the current "starve the NSF" administration).
That's what favorable tax treatment of long term capital gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what that tax treatment is used for.
It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long term done.
> That's what favorable tax treatment of long term capital gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what that tax treatment is used for.
The minimum duration for that qualification is one year. One year is nowhere near "long term" for a public works project. The Columbia shuttle took almost a decade to build. The interstate highway system took over three decades (and requires costly and ongoing maintenance).
> It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long term done.
What it ultimately requires is a trifecta of power (to fund the thing), vision (to plan the thing) and longevity (to see the thing through). Those three requirements could be satisfied by a government body or by a munificent billionaire, but democratically-minded people tend to put more faith in the former than in the latter.
I wonder whether we get more satisfaction from chasing things that no one has ever done or will ever attempt again or, whether we build a more satisfactory legacy of accomplishments by attempting things that we ourselves have never done, even if lots of other people have done those things.
Would I rather reminisce in my old age about all the things that I could've done that would've set me apart from all of my peers or spend my old age in a constant brag about all the fun I had, completely satisfied because I had chosen activities and challenged myself to succeed at building skills and experiences that made my own life interesting and challenged me mentally or physically.
I started building something pretty obscure about 14 years ago; https://socketcluster.io/ an open source, WebSocket-based RPC + pub/sub library with a focus on in-order async stream-processing with backpressure monitoring.
It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to multiple processes.
It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for most application logic and people are still not using queues where they should be. People think of queues as some expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the benefits.
I had a similar issue. The blind spot was unit tests.
I think the issue is just that it's incredibly hard to sell an abstract idea and incredibly hard to convince people to abandon ingrained habit.
I created a testing framework where you wrote half a test in YAML and the framework filled in the rest based on program output.
It made writing tests quick, easy and even kinda fun.
Moreover if you added a bit of explanation prose to the YAML and used a slightly nicer example scenario it would generate you guaranteed up-to-date readable markdown how to docs. For free.
But, these things are culturally chorey and there's a shame culture built around them.
If people aren’t doing as you describe, maybe it’s not cracked up to all you think it is?
I can’t think of many places, even one if I’m being honest, where I’ve needed what you describe.
I never found myself in fear that I’m doing something unoriginal. However, I do find myself worrying I'm doing something a better resourced competitor is also working on. Most things worth doing are actually quite obvious. The determining factor in success is execution, not originality.
Don't strive to be original. Pursue other goals and the originality will emerge naturally. Accept that it won't be yours because your role is a supporting actor.
I don't really get the need for originality here. Why does it matter if someone else has done the thing too?
Just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the order on a piece of paper.
You will produce a completely unique page.
Would be a good advice without this need of comparing to others