If you’ve been around computers long enough you might have heard the term “bug” – a flaw or error in a software program that causes it to behave unexpectedly.
There are debates over who coined it. Some credit Thomas Edison in an 1878 letter. Others credit Grace Hopper, the American computer scientist and mathematician, who in 1947 discovered that the computer she and her team were working on at Harvard wasn’t responding as expected, because an actual moth (bug) was stuck inside it.
After that, Grace coined the term “debugging”: removing the bug. Not just literally anymore but metaphorically. Any glitch interfering with the expected result had to be removed so the system could function as intended.
You’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the title of this essay. It has everything to do with it. Because just like computers, we’re also programmed: by our parents, teachers, society, the government and our friends. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Having guardrails based on how most people behave keeps you out of danger and out of prison. Fair enough.
The problem starts when we debug every little glitch or unexpected outcome simply because it’s unfamiliar, even when it poses no real risk to anyone.
Say you wanted to become a doctor and your high school marks fall short. A friend mentions a retail opening. Instead of exploring it you pivot to pharmacy or nursing – anything that still resembles medicine – rather than trying something genuinely new.
Most people do this. They treat every detour as a bug to be fixed rather than a road worth taking. And in doing so they design a life with very little story in it. Because when the journey takes a sharp curve you might knock your head or wet your pants, but that’s still more interesting than “it was straightforward and we arrived.”
Who wants to listen to that drab story?
Yesterday, on my birthday, a friend and I ended up in one of those conversations I genuinely love: African spirituality, what success meant before versus now, how things were done and how we’ve lost the plot. At some point I said: “The problem with most of us as black people is our tendency to use Western maps to find our own paths.”
My point was that you can’t define your success by another culture’s standards when you come from completely different worlds. Some people define success by the number of zeroes in their bank account. Many black families have historically defined it differently. By how many relatives you helped raise, by whether the extended family gathers and is genuinely happy and more importantly, by whether your success lifts others.
These aren’t comparable systems. Neither is better. They’re just different. And the danger is treating one as the default while quietly discarding the other.
My friend went quiet, then said: “I’ve never heard anyone break this down the way you did. How do you have such original ideas?”
I paused. Mumbled, actually. I didn’t expect the question and it felt strange to answer it without sounding like I was claiming to be some great genius, which I’m not. But three things kept coming up when I tried: reading, relaxing and travelling.
Reading
It’s hard to think deeply about any topic if you’ve only looked at it from one angle. Reading helps you build on your assumptions, break them down and then form new knowledge by weaving together what you believed, what you now know and what you actually think about all of it.
That combination – filtered through your specific personality and life – is what makes an idea feel original.
Say you believe psychology graduates can’t find jobs. You start reading and discover the field is actually growing because of the rise in mental health awareness. Now you have a new insight: not that the field is useless, but that graduates need to find niche markets like childhood trauma and marriage counselling rather than waiting for traditional roles.
That’s not a radical idea on its own. But when you weave in why you thought what you thought, and what changed your mind, it becomes something no one else could have said in quite that way.
You as an individual are the ingredient that makes it original.
Relaxing
This is probably the most underrated one. We tend to think relaxing means wasting time, so we’ve redefined it as lying on the couch scrolling our feeds and chuckling at dumb TikTok videos. That’s not what I mean.
I mean the kind of relaxing with no gadgets and no one directing your attention… just you and your thoughts.
And what makes it even more useful is writing those thoughts down. Not because they’re brilliant or because they’re worth publishing. But because most people genuinely don’t know how they think. They’ve never sat in enough stillness to ask: why do I actually believe this? Where did this come from?
That’s why you get people who are intense about views they themselves can’t explain or trace. Writing your thoughts down – messy and unfinished as they sometimes are – is the best way to understand your own mind. And once you understand how you think, you can start to make it sharper.
Travelling
When I say travelling, I don’t mean flights and foreign currencies. I mean the art of noticing things outside your own room. A nearby town. A different city. Another country if you’re able to, but that’s not the point.
Travelling makes you an original thinker because your experience of any new place is entirely yours. Two people can visit the same town and leave with completely different observations.
Notice the things that would be invisible to someone who grew up there: the gestures, the local phrases, the way people carry themselves in a queue or greet a stranger.
What makes it especially powerful is how a new place confronts what you consider normal. I was in Joburg recently and I’m always struck by the pace: people walk faster there, and when strangers approach you they’re usually trying to sell you something, including lies.
For example, I grew up in a farming village, then at some point went to boarding school in East London, then moved to Cape Town. Each place rewired what I considered a norm and gave me a set of comparisons and observations that no one else has in quite the same configuration.
When I talk about African spirituality, for instance, I’m not drawing purely from books… I grew up around it. That lived context is what makes the insight feel like something someone else probably wouldn’t say.
Why most people lack original ideas
The real issue isn’t lack of ideas. It’s that most of us consume without questioning. And I don’t mean argue every point. You’ll look woke and weird, don’t do that.
I mean regularly asking yourself: what does this mean to me? Where do I agree? Where do I not, and why? It’s dangerous to your own thinking to always put other people’s ideas above your own, even if those people are world-renowned professors. If you’re struggling to glean anything from what’s in front of you, it’s probably just useless information for you right now.
Original ideas can come from the most ordinary sources, as long as you bring yourself into them. I’ve never heard anyone compare debugging to human behaviour the way I did at the start of this essay, but it wasn’t a massive genius leap. It came from working with computers every day and reading a lot of psychology. Two things I already do anyway.
Nothing is really original. The problem is that most of us are so busy debugging every unexpected outcome – every detour, every curve, every thing that doesn’t match the plan – that we never slow down long enough to notice what the detour was actually showing us.
The people we call original thinkers aren’t necessarily smarter. They’ve just stopped treating their own life as a system that needs to run without errors. They let the bugs in. And sometimes the bug turns out to be the most interesting thing that ever happened to them.
© Phumzile