Theory isn't built from nothing. It's built on top of existing theory. But climbing up is not the goal — finding the gap is. Today I show you how.
People who want to make new theories or content share one misconception. "You have to create something from nothing." They sit at a blank page and try to squeeze something new out of their head. They believe that's creation. A few hours in, headache, nothing. I did this for years. Once I found the fix, writing got much faster. Today I'll share it. Stand on a giant's shoulder and look for the gap. Let me go slowly.
This essay covers three things: why creation-from-nothing doesn't work, how to pick your giants, and how to find the gap.
Let me start with reality. Newton has a famous line. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This is not a cute metaphor. It's fact.
Almost no theory in the world is fully new. Most innovation is either changing a specific piece of an existing theory, connecting two theories, or filling what's missing in one. Einstein stood on Newton. Steve Jobs stood on Xerox PARC. Nothing came from absolute nothing.
But most people start creation by imagining a blank page. That's a near-impossible mission. There's no floor to build on. I read dozens of books and failed dozens of times before this clicked.
Here's an easy way to see it. Think of a neighborhood playground.
There's a big tree. Kids try to climb it. How do they do it? They don't jump up bare. They step on a low branch as a platform. On that, a higher branch. On that, another. The kid who climbs highest isn't the best jumper — it's the one who found the platforms.
Theory works the same. You can't jump up alone. You need to place your foot on a platform someone built before. Then from up there, look around. "This branch reaches here. Over there, empty space." That empty direction becomes your new branch.
A concrete example. One of the most famous theories in design history is "form follows function." A Bauhaus principle from the 1920s. Ornament is sin, function is truth. This theory ruled design for 100 years.
A great theory. But it had a gap. Emotion. Nowhere in the theory was there room for "how does a person feel looking at this." Function was perfect but cold. People started calling it "cold."
In the 1970s, some people saw this gap. They asked: "What about emotion, not just function?" That one question birthed postmodern design. Ornament came back. Humor came back. Color came back. The rounded corners of your iPhone, Apple's design language — all results of filling that gap.
New theory isn't planted on empty land. It's planted in the space next to the existing theory.
That's the real structure of creation. Not criticism. Contribution.
Now practice. Pick three giants in your field. Three, not one, not five. One means you get subordinated to them. Five is too wide to focus. Three is the sweet spot.
For video-making, here are my three.
Giant 1 — Ira Glass. Host of This American Life. Built the theoretical foundation of storytelling.
Giant 2 — Mr. Beast. Hit the peak of data-driven content optimization on YouTube.
Giant 3 — Casey Neistat. Pioneered the cinematic grammar of everyday vlogs.
I studied these three intensively for 6 months. Read books, watched hundreds of videos. Through that, I saw their common terrain — and at the same time, the places they missed.
After studying the giants, I use three questions to find gaps.
One — "What does this theory assume?" Every theory sits on an assumption. Bauhaus assumed "design is unrelated to emotion." Flip the assumption and there's a gap.
Two — "What did this theory deliberately leave out?" Every theory is a choice. To emphasize A, B was pushed back. That pushed-back B is a gap. Mr. Beast consciously minimized emotional subtlety to emphasize shock. That subtlety was my gap.
Three — "If this theory was made 30 years ago, what current reality does it miss?" New realities emerge over time. We now have things the giants didn't — AI, smartphones, short-form video. The space between that new reality and the old theory is a gap.
My gap was "storytelling depth (Ira Glass) × YouTube optimization (Mr. Beast) × AI-era production tools." Where those three overlap is empty space — that's my channel's spot.
One trap. Finding a gap is not criticizing the giant. Many fall here. "Mr. Beast is shallow." "Ira Glass is outdated." They try to put the giant down.
Don't. The giant did the best of their era. The gap you're finding wasn't caused by their failure — it's a space that opened over time. Thank them, and stack on top. Criticism severs lineage. Contribution extends it. Work that stands on a lineage lasts.
One more reframe. Some people feel discouraged: "All the seniors have done it already — what's left for me?" It's the opposite. Many giants is a blessing.
Many giants means many platforms. Between someone starting barefoot in a wasteland and someone starting on dozens of platforms, who climbs higher? Obviously the latter. If your field has many giants, that means you can stand on all those shoulders and see higher. Absorbing 100 years of theory in one year is a gift of this era.
I think my field has more than 50 giants. I have the luxury of choosing which one becomes my platform.
Don't immediately write the book or the theory. Too fast. There's a middle step. I call it "proving through work."
When you find a gap, it's still just a hypothesis that this space is empty. Whether it really is — and what comes out of it — only work proves. Writing theory first piles it in your head with no force. In my case, after finding the gap, I made 12 videos before writing any theory. Only after data on how those videos differed from standard YouTube grammar, and how subscribers responded, did I write the theory essay.
Work is the evidence for theory. Don't flip the order.
Theory isn't made from nothing. It's planted in the gap next to existing theory. Pick three giants, study them for six months, and use three questions (assumption, exclusion, era gap) to find the gap.
Tonight, just do step one. Write down the three giants of your field on paper. If you can't name three, that means you don't know how your field has evolved over the last ten years. Learn the giants first.
Not criticism. Contribution.
Remember — assumption, exclusion, era.