Human progress is amazing. We’ve come from living in cages to building space rockets and a global communication network that allows two people on opposite ends of the planet to have a real time, visual conversation thanks to supercomputers that fit into our pockets.

Many innovations were inevitable. If, for example, whoever invented the wheel hadn’t invented it, someone else would have. But there are oddities. Let me give you an example: When I was a kid, I remember going on vacation with my family and my parents used to haul around these big, heavy leather suitcases. They were clunky, heavy – and had no wheels.

Look around in any airport today: You’ll only see suitcases with wheels. It’s such a simple innovation, but it happened in the last thirty years. Before that, apparently no one had the idea to put wheels on a suitcase, even though it seems so obvious now (ok, the patent for the wheeled suitcase was filed in 1970, but it seemed to have taken decades for them to reach the mainstream).

I’m rewatching the science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was written in the late eighties and early nineties. The show depicts an utopic future where we travel space and have overcome scarcity, illness and war – but it seems we still have to schlep around weighty suitcases, as you can see in the title image.

There must be more like this

Isn’t it weird? I know that some innovations can only happen when the right conditions of progress are met. But this one? They could have done it a hundred years ago, which was when the suitcase was invented. The wheel was already there. They only had to put 2 and 2 together.

But nobody did.

Which is what I like to remind myself if I’m getting pessimistic about my own creative potential. “Everything has already been done, better than I ever could”, I tell myself. “There’s nothing new under the sun, why even try?”

Well, that’s why: If we couldn’t come up with wheeled suitcases for so long, then there are other obvious innovations around us right now that we, for some reason, weren’t able to see until now. Creativity and innovation often means combining existing things when the world is ready for them. It’s worth it to look around. To stay open. You might just discover an idea in plain sight that nobody else notices.