We Think Between the Shoulders of Giant Minds

We like to tell ourselves that good ideas arrive in lightning flashes.

A walk in the woods. A shower. A late-night scribble on a napkin. The myth is that creativity appears out of nowhere — a pure bolt from the blue.

But if we’re honest, most of what we call “original” is something quieter and more humble: we’re thinking between the shoulders of giant minds.

The giants metaphor is a familiar one. It suggests that we’re lifted up by those who came before us — scientists, artists, teachers, mentors, friends — and from that higher vantage point we can see further. That image is beautiful and true, but it’s also a bit misleading. It’s too clean. Too solitary.

Real thinking doesn’t just happen on someone’s shoulders, looking out at the horizon. It happens between minds — ours and theirs. In the spaces where ideas echo, collide, blend, and cross-pollinate.

The myth of the lone genius

Every field has its heroes: the one composer, the one inventor, the one mathematician, the one visionary founder who “changed everything.”

But look more closely and you’ll always find a network:

• A teacher who asked the right question at the right time.
• A forgotten paper that introduced a small twist nobody noticed at first.
• A colleague who argued with you just enough to make you sharpen your thinking.
• A book you read as a teenager that quietly rewired the way you see the world.

By the time an idea surfaces in your notebook or in your prototype, it has already flowed through decades or centuries of other people’s work. You’re not stealing from them. You’re participating in the same ongoing conversation they were part of.

We don’t invent from scratch. We tune. We combine. We rearrange. We question. We repair. We remix.

That’s what it means to think between the shoulders of giant minds.

The invisible lineage behind your ideas

If you trace any one of your current projects backwards, you’ll almost always find an invisible lineage.

Maybe your way of organizing information came from that one meticulous teacher who color-coded everything on the board.
Maybe your curiosity about patterns came from early puzzles, board games, or the weird joy of discovering that math could be playful.
Maybe your interest in human-friendly tools came from watching someone struggle with brittle, unfriendly software and thinking: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

A lot of what we call “inspiration” is really this: a quiet, accumulated pressure of prior minds nudging us toward our own version of the work.

And here’s the important part: acknowledging that doesn’t make your contribution smaller. It makes it more human.

You’re not a fraud because your ideas have ancestors. You’re part of a lineage because they do.

Few ideas are truly unborrowed

You could phrase it bluntly: Few ideas are not accidentally borrowed.

We absorb more than we realize: from articles, open-source repositories, conversations, half-remembered talks, even casual comments that stick in our minds years later. Most of the time, the lines of influence are so tangled that we couldn’t untangle them even if we tried.

That doesn’t mean rigor and attribution don’t matter — they do. It just means that, on a deeper level, creativity has always been a shared endeavor.

We’re all building with pieces we didn’t forge ourselves. What matters is:

• How honestly we work.
• How clearly we acknowledge the foundations when we’re aware of them.
• How generously we share what we discover so someone else can build on us.

We inherit, transform, and pass it on.

Thinking as a relay, not a spotlight

Once you start seeing thinking as a relay instead of a spotlight, a few things change:

• Pressure drops. You no longer need to be the once-in-a-century genius. You just need to carry the baton well for your leg of the race.
• Curiosity rises. Instead of obsessing over “being original,” you can ask better questions: What am I standing on? What am I extending? What can I repair or connect that others haven’t?
• Gratitude grows. You begin to notice how many people — some you’ve never met — quietly invested in the tools, ideas, and patterns you now take for granted.

You realize that the real miracle is not that you had an idea, but that so much infrastructure of thought was already there waiting for you to notice it.

The responsibility of being someone else’s “giant”

There’s also a gentle responsibility baked into this metaphor.

If we are, all of us, thinking between the shoulders of giant minds, then we are also, in small ways, becoming shoulders for someone else.

Not necessarily through world-famous achievements. Sometimes through:

• A clean explanation that finally makes a tricky concept feel intuitive.
• An open, generous tool or library that saves someone else days of frustration.
• A blog post or talk that gives another person permission to explore their own weird ideas.
• A game, puzzle, or visualization that quietly plants a seed of curiosity.

You may never know whose work your work enables. But that doesn’t make the influence less real.

Every time you turn your private insights into something visible — a sketch, a prototype, a post, a talk, a little app, a tiny utility script — you’re adding a small but sturdy foothold to the mountain of shared understanding.

Somewhere, someone may stand on it. Or think between it and a dozen others, and create something you could never have imagined.

A more honest, kinder story of creativity

“We think between the shoulders of giant minds” is, in a way, an invitation to a kinder story about creativity:

• Kinder to the past, because it recognizes how much we owe.
• Kinder to ourselves, because it takes the crushing weight of “be utterly original” off our shoulders.
• Kinder to the future, because it reminds us that our work can be a gift, not just a product.

So the next time an idea appears and you’re tempted to dismiss it as “not original enough,” try a different lens:

Ask instead:

• Which minds am I standing between right now?
• What small, honest contribution can I add to this ongoing conversation?
• How can I leave this idea in better shape than I found it?

You don’t have to be the giant.

You just have to be part of the bridge between them.

Meta-note: This essay was generated with the help of an AI assistant (ChatGPT), using my prompt and prior conversations as raw material. I’ve reviewed it, resonated with it, and chosen to share it here as part of my ongoing exploration of human + machine co-writing.