Everyone's Busy Copying—Here's How to Make Something Original
Creativity and creative living for those who don't want to wait for muses.
Here’s how I play the game: if everyone’s doing it, I assume there’s a stranger, smarter way.
When it comes to joy, I reverse-engineer most societal blueprints. That means: if you want to go out for dinner and drinks on a Friday night? I won’t be joining. If it requires a buzzer that vibrates when a hostess says, “We’re running about 45 to an hour right now,” that’s when I mysteriously get a craving for protein-enhanced pop-tarts and reruns of Succession.
You know what’s never crowded? Tuesday. Tuesday is the socially neglected child of the weekly calendar. The restaurant staff is relaxed. You get the corner booth. You get the bartender who gives a damn. You’re more likely to strike up an unexpected conversation with a real person instead of trying to scream over a playlist that was assembled by someone who believes volume equals value.
Tuesdays are where intimacy goes when it’s tired of elbowing its way through the mobs.
Zig Strategy #1: Invert the Peak
Humans are deeply pattern-prone. We wait until our scheduled vacation time, then all cram into planes, hotels, museums, and pools. This is how you end up paying $390 for a “garden view” room that’s facing a parking lot with a dying bush.
Why not take a day off on a random Wednesday in March, when everyone else is embedded in spreadsheets and Zoom calls? That’s when nature is still, hotels are cheaper, and the sun hits you differently because you earned this moment of idleness by choosing it. I’m 86.3% the way there in convincing my daughters to celebrate Thanksgiving on November 4th and Christmas on January 5th…
Zig Strategy #2: Timing Strolls
Right now I’m in Myrtle Beach which feels like Dante’s 3rd circle of hell for anyone over age 35. This is the (beach) week when 18-year-olds from every stretch of the eastern seaboard swarm the coast like a sweaty, half-sunscreened tornado. My official title? Accidental chaperone. After a high-stakes series of rock-paper-scissors matches, I lost, and with that, I forfeited my bodily autonomy. I’m now embedded in a house with my freshly graduated twin daughters and sixteen of their equally hyped friends. “Supervise” might be too generous a word. I’m more of a reluctant sentinel. Present, semi-alert, and quietly hoping the local EMTs don’t learn my name.
They’re recovering from sugar-ethanol hangovers of Twisted Tea and Lynchburg Lemonade. I’m walking barefoot at 6 a.m. through a pastel sunrise that looks like it was drawn by a four-year-old with a new set of markers. On the beach, I pass only two other people. Both look like they could tell me what being alive in 1932 was like firsthand. Metal detectors. Army hats. Slow, shuffles.
They nod at me. We are the woke. (I’m repurposing this politically charged minefield slur into something cool.)
There’s something sacred in the hollow hours where the earth breathes in and you remember that pleasures don’t have to be scheduled. Nobody photobombing your sunrise. Just the sound of gulls arguing and your feet remembering that they can burn. Good pain.
Zig Strategy #3: Skip the Pleasure Parade
Never have I…associated joy with queues, parking validation, or someone shouting “Brad!” over a 200-person crowd in a brewery. I grew up near New York City, so yes, I have been the person who stood in a hallway for 40 minutes to be granted access to a mediocre table near the kitchen. Why? Because “everyone” said it was the place to be. That kind of joy-by-consensus doesn’t gel with my personality.
If I could empower readers with similar sentiments. The people who regularly search for “adventures off the beaten path” before taking trips then my job here is done.
What if we treat the consensus as a warning sign?
When people zig, try zagging. To be free.
Novelty remains the cheapest, simplest mechanism to counteract the tendency for positive experiences to be temporary. We quickly adapt and require something that offers more to feel the same sense of emotional elevation.
Zig Strategy #4: Small is Sacred
The best date I’ve been on in the past year? It was to a strange Vietnamese smoothie shop hidden between a jiu-jitsu gym and a liquor store in an unremarkable strip mall. Just the two of us, talking for three hours, our drinks getting cold because the conversation burned hotter than anything on the table. Until…(a story for another day).
Zagging means remembering that smaller often means better. Intimacy builds faster in tight spaces. Tiny, thoughtful gifts lying on a chair evoke wonder. Spending zero cash to stare at clouds in the grass (as a certified member of the Cloud Appreciation Society). Just remember: Gluttony is an enemy of the sublime.
We’re not done yet and this includes insight into how I choose research questions to study (and the link to the next AMA session for premium subscribers - details here).