Category: New

A plan, a business, a drawing, a person: what have you started that didn’t exist? When have you made something new?

Creation is a funny thing. Often, you start with nothing — a blank page, for example. And then an idea comes, you put that idea down on the page, and suddenly something exists that didn’t exist before. It’s like magic! You created something from nothing, conjured something from thin air.

Another example seems almost miraculous, but in fact is incredibly common: the act of giving birth. A man and a woman, together, create an entire human being who didn’t exist before. While the resulting baby can’t do much on their own at first, eventually they are a self-sufficient adult. It’s the way of the world, but it doesn’t make it any less remarkable.

Intellectual Roundtable is another example. Back in 2016 it started as a simple idea, and after some fine-tuning and some back and forth between Michael and me, in 2017 we debuted our first question, Why do we like what we like? Before we had the idea, registered the domain name, rented some server space, thought of some questions, and then published the first one, Intellectual Roundtable simply didn’t exist. Now, years later, not only does it exist, we’ve published more than 1300 distinct questions.

Indeed, the world is full of things — chairs, books, songs, spatulas, equations — that someone had to think up and turn into something to share with other humans. None of those things existed before, at least not in their current form.

So what about you? What is an example of something that you made, that you brought into being from nothingness? It might be something as simple as a doodle, or as complicated as a building. Because of you, what exists that didn’t exist before?

Related questions: Where do shared ideas exist? Create or consume? What art do you make?