Why is it that we are all so gung ho about reinventing the wheel? Yes, I know that the dream you had last night about a triangular unicycle with bearings made out of specially engineered, Burmese balsa wood seemed pretty cool at the time but ask yourself whether it is really worth the dozens of hours it would take to get to Burma and the hundreds more to find someone willing to decipher the “schematics” you jotted down on that cocktail napkin on the airplane ride over, or is it that your “invention” is just another thinly veiled way of proving how clever you are?

The world’s most spectacular structures and greatest inventions share one thing in common, they are composed primarily of simple, off the shelf parts. While there may be a few bits and pieces here and there that needed to be made from scratch, one of the core principles of functional design is to reuse as much as you can so you can focus your mind on what’s really important — how those parts fit together.

Your laptop, your television, the poster on your wall, the water bottle you drink from, and the Rock Band drum set you wile away your weekends on are all composed of a pretty basic set of pieces that have been fitted together to form something unique. No one sat there thinking about what fantastic new materials they could make your television case out of. Why? Because for the the most part it would have been a waste of time that ignored the fact that people are a lot more interested in image fidelity, ease of use and how many HD outputs the TV has.

Artists, designers and inventors understand that it isn’t the substance that matters, it’s the flow. The art isn’t in coming up with new components, it is in doing something different with what you have and creating from scratch only when that creation adds something dramatic. Flow is what makes an iPod different than a Zune, flow is what makes one oil painting a masterpiece and another a wall poster, and flow is what makes some musicians cover bands and other superstars.

This might seem obvious but that’s before you recognize how easy it is to get caught up in the allure of the new. It’s amazing how many people will completely ignore flow in order to spend more time thinking about whizbang new materials. They’ll focus their energy on the features rather than how those features fit together or whether those features actually even do anything. They’ll create new stuff for the sake of being able to say they invented something and even if their “invention” has less staying power than the motorized pickle jar opener.

When you’re sitting down thinking up your next site, your next business or your next piece of creative work take a moment to jot down what you won’t have to build from scratch. Look for what you can pull off the shelf and see where you can use someone elses effort as a framework on which to design something great. Get over this need to reinvent the wheel and busy yourself instead with the more important task of using the wheel to do something valuable.

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