The idea I’ll be teasing out here is a mash-up, which is itself the first lesson: creativity comes from putting things together that haven’t gone together before. Which in turn immediately needs two further qualifications:

a) Most mash-ups fail. There’s a reason you like tomatoes with basil, but not so much tomatoes with turnips or basil with caramel. You probably could find a way to make the latter two combos work, but they would be the culinary equivalent of a novelty song.

b) Most mash-ups that dominate the internet these days are not creative mash-ups, but the rather sad retreads of a culture that is increasingly incapable of creating anything new, so it resorts to nostalgia instead. (Why that should be so is a topic for another time.) See also sequels that never come close to the genius of the original, and reboots-because-money.

Anyway, back to the beginning: my mash-up is the result of studying the indie publishing phenomenon for the past three years or so, with the goal of becoming part of it myself, plus learning more idly and just for pleasure about the history of rock-and-roll. (Most credit for that learning goes to the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.)

I’ve also dabbled in big-idea-nonfiction lit about creativity and entrepreneurship, such as Range by David Epstein, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and various works from Derek Sivers and Mark McGuinness, among others. Not to mention following the nose of my own fandom.

Thus I’ve developed, in the same idle, fandom kind of way, a working hypothesis of two trajectories toward creative success…