You and your work are not on an island. You are part of a tradition—the most recent people to join a party that started decades, maybe centuries or millennia ago. 

Who came before you? What work came before your work?

“For me music has always been about lineage,” Philip Glass writes in his memoir, Words Without Music. “The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”

Two people will come from the same creative lineage, and still make very different work because they apply their own perspectives, taste, and flair to create their own distinct styles. “Influences are always there, it’s how you process the influence in your work,” artist Liza Donnelly writes.