Finding Ideas In The Mundane and Familiar

How many times have you walked past something and not really seen it? How many times have you seen something a million times without ever really noticing it? It’s easy to take the familiar for granted. We’re so used to it, we see it as mundane and stop paying attention.

“The Disease of the Familiar”, a term coined by Richard Saul Wurman, is a condition that plagues many people who are so familiar with something they don’t know what it’s like not to be.

“The key to making things understandable is to understand what it’s like NOT to understand.” ~Richard Saul Wurman

The familiar can prevent us from experiencing discovery. We may think we know everything there is to know about a subject, but if we’re not open to new ideas,, we will not discover the new.

The Disease of the Familiar

We are all infected with the disease of the familiar.

Take, for example, your own home. You probably know every nook and cranny, but have you ever really looked at it? Taken the time to notice all the different textures on the walls or the way the light shines through the windows? Probably not. Because we’ve become so familiar with our home, we’ve stopped seeing it.