A few nights ago, my wife and I were talking about books.
Not any one in particular but just about how often stories tend to overlap. Characters, themes, even entire worlds that feel oddly familiar, like you’ve been there before but through someone else’s words.
We ended up speaking about Dune and Star Wars.
Not to compare them, but to explore how two massive, genre-defining works can sometimes seem like they’re part of the same larger thread, shaped by similar ideas, built on the same fundamental questions, yet somehow entirely distinct. The same motifs power, prophecy, rebellion but told through different worlds, different voices, different imaginations.
And it got me thinking about this quiet pressure so many of us feel when we create.
This need to be ORIGINAL.
To say something that’s never been said.
To build something that has no resemblance to anything else that came before it.
It sounds noble, even necessary, until you sit down to actually make something.
That’s when it starts to get in the way.
Because once the fear of similarity sets in, everything starts to feel fake or copied.
We wonder if We're just rehashing ideas. We second-guess ourself because we remember reading something vaguely like it, somewhere, once. And even though our version came from somewhere personal, a memory, a thought, a quiet moment in the middle of the night, it suddenly feels like it’s not ours anymore.
And then, more often than not, we pause.
We tweak it until it sounds like something else entirely.
Or just let it go.
But here’s the truth: almost nothing is untouched.
Most of what we create is shaped by what we’ve read, seen, felt, and experienced. We absorb things without meaning to. Some of it sticks in ways we don’t even notice. And eventually, when the idea starts taking shape, it’s not always clean or entirely new. But it is honest.
And maybe that’s the part that matters most.
There’s a difference between making something unique, and making something authentic.
One chases distance. The other just tells the truth.
So yes, there will always be books with similar plots. Business ideas that feel like cousins of each other. Projects that echo older ones. But the way you bring them to life, the lens you use, the voice you portray, the version that comes from where you’ve been, that’s the part that can’t be borrowed.
And the more we worry about whether it’s “original enough,†the more we forget to ask if it’s true enough.
Because maybe that’s the question we need to sit with.
Not whether it’s groundbreaking, but whether it’s honest.
Not whether it’s new, but whether it’s truely you.