Within academia, in my case in sociology, a similar insight dawned on me: Almost nobody ever comes up with a new idea (a real new theory). The ideas are always reused versions of things others have said, or simply applications of these ideas, or at most a small, often rather questionable, tweak to someone else’s theory. The very top people of each field seemed to be the ones who had come up with one new theory—and out of these only very few theories seemed to make much sense.
