You Need To Develop "Terrain Consciousness"
But wait: what does it mean?
If you want to write thrillers, you must compete for space on the thriller bookshelf with Agatha Christie. If you want to write a fantasy series, your competition is J.K. Rowling, J.R.R Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. Want to put out a mystery novel? Congrats, you’re in competition with Sherlock Holmes now. No matter what genre of writing—or work—you choose to do, you will always find yourself on a specific terrain. In a certain territory. To internalize this fact is to develop “terrain consciousness.”
All painters are in competition with Leonardo Da Vinci. All physicists are in competition with Einstein. All architects are in competition with Antoni Gaudí. Do you now see why people don’t want to develop terrain consciousness? To become conscious of your terrain is to realize who you’re up against—and people would rather not know. It’s terrifying. But if you can swallow your terror, you’ll see the remarkable benefits of terrain consciousness. If you’re on the same terrain as Da Vinci—great. Now you can copy him. You can steal his secrets. You can pick up from where he left off.
You can finish his half-finished thoughts.
You can avoid his mistakes.
And you can stop agonizing yourself with this question: “What am I even doing?!”
No matter what you are doing, you’re not the first to do it. Even if you’re literally inventing new things out of thin air, you’re following in the footsteps of Tesla, Edison, Kettering, Lindenberg, the Wright Brothers, and the guy who came up with the wheel. Except the guy who came up with the wheel, all these people left notes. Wrote books. Gave interviews. You are on their terrain, and their achievements make you look puny…but they’ve also left behind clues and lessons for those who care to find them.
If you psyop yourself into thinking that you face unprecedented problems, then your anxiety will freeze you up. But if you realize that the terrain you walk on has been traversed, mapped, and conquered before, then you will relax. If nothing is unprecedented, then there are always reference points.
Restlessly chasing after the mirage of originality is how you end up all alone in the desert. You can see this restlessness among modern artists. Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall (2019). Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a museum (1917). Pollock splashed paint randomly on canvas (1950). Among all these “original” artists I sense the same nervous desire to be different at any and all cost. But mere originality is nothing—I can easily generate an absolutely original word by sitting on my keyboard. That does not make me Shakespeare. That doesn’t even make me a writer. But…if I can use words used a million times before, in an order dictated by my spirit, so that they add up to a new idea…then I’m getting somewhere.
The Ancient Greeks believed the creative muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne—the Greek Goddess of memory. There’s a profound lesson here: the road to creative inspiration lies not through randomness but remembrance. Across eons, the masters are in dialogue with each other. To scream your lonely song all alone in a room…is to miss the point of art.
You are on the terrain you are in. Accept it. Accept, also, that mavericks and tireless maniacs have roamed this exact terrain before. From these past masters—borrow freely. Learn carefully. Compete ferociously.
My friend, start developing terrain consciousness...
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