The Genealogy of ideas

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
Here’s a trick they teach you in art school. Draw two parallel lines on a piece of paper:

How many lines are there?
There’s the first line, the second line, but then there’s a line of negative space that runs between them.
See it? 1 + 1 = 3.

A good example is genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.
Just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

“We were kids without fathers . . . so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.”
—Jay-Z