People tend to use the phrase "oh, you're just reinventing the wheel" as a slur or put down, suggesting that you're not really coming up with an original idea.
However, I'm not sure that kind of attitude is always merited... although I suppose it depends on what your expectations were.
If you look back across The Human Experience, the vast majority of things that became highly successful were not new inventions, but small incremental changes to something that already existed.
A lot of new things — however lauded they may be, as "genius" — tend to turn out to be failures, not only in terms of adoption but also in terms of expense or commercial success. People pour their life into something they think is going to be "the next great thing," and they lose their life savings as a consequence.
We hear about the success stories because they end up in the news and the magazines, but we don't hear about the 95% of inventors who ended up living in a gutter because they gambled everything on their concept and nothing happened. Often through no fault of their own... maybe the invention was amazing, but the timing or marketing was off.
But how do we really look at the success of inventions? What makes an invention worthwhile as opposed to just NEW, but dumb as a box of rocks.
Do we just care about "new, for its own sake?" As in, do we not really care whether something is popular or successful, just whether people look at it and exclaim "Wow, I've NEVER seen that before!"
Or do we care about financial success? Amazon started as an online bookstore... but the idea of a "bookseller" was hardly a new invention, or a new idea. It wasn't even an effort to dominate a nascent industry... bookselling was already a mature industry when Amazon came along.
To go back to the metaphor in the title of this post... you could very well argue that Amazon has "made theirs" by reinventing the wheel...
What drives innovators, anyway? Is it the need to create new things, or the hope that their next new idea will become that item that catches on fire and becomes the next "as seen on TV" gadget absolutely everyone has to have for the next holiday celebration?
I recognize that I may be the wrong person to contemplate these questions, seeing as how I have consistently been a "late adopter" of new trends for most of my life. As a piece of personal philosophy, I believe that if something we already have is working (pretty well, or better) there's no real reason to change it, purely for the sake of change.
And there's a fair bit of innovation that I outright have disliked because — while it might have been "fancier" and more modern — it ultimately complexified something simpler and added additional cost for not much benefit.
"Yes, but it's new and improved!"
Who gives a flip...?
Pioneering is hard... I actually tried it, within the retail field. Failed spectacularly... tried again, with just a minor departure from the tried and true — much more successful.
I guess that "reinventing the wheel" just makes the most sense, a lot of the time!
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2026.09.09 23:34 PDT
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