that imagining something that nobody had yet thought about or mentioned was much harder. Yes I agree with your friend finding something truly and absolutely no

that imagining something that nobody had yet thought about or mentioned was much harder. Yes I agree with your friend finding something truly and absolutely novel is incredibly hard and rare, but you almost never need to. A variation on a theme is often enough, especially if the execution is better than previous versions. For instance, not only do Avatar and The Last Samurai come from a literary archetype, they come from the same literary archetype. The idea for figuring out how fast something changes was around for a long time before Newton and Leibniz developped differential calculus. Myspace predates Facebook. the idea is a requirement before execution can begin An idea is required before you can execute clearly, but once you start executing that idea often evolves in quite unexpected ways. There are also cases of discovering something purely by chance while working on something unrelated as long as you are executing something.