It'd be nice to have an original thought...

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...pretty much everything in your head came from somewhere else. Aside from the odd profound innovator, everything circulating in human culture is a recombined, repackaged, blended and idiosyncratic version of something invented ages ago. After all, the physical world is more or less exactly the same stuff that's always been here for the last several million years now. We might recombine the bits in different ways, and describe them differently, but not that much is really ever new under the sun. So don't feel bad if you haven't got a lot of truly original shit in your head. Very very few people do. If it makes you feel better, you'll be well on your way to original thoughts once you've done a thorough housecleaning. But I digress...

My take on this skill comes in two parts. It grows and evolves in all kinds of interesting ways, but here's how you start:
First of all, take some time to notice what is influencing your thoughts, speech, and actions in your surroundings. Other people, the architecture, the weather, your job, the media. It may seem common sense, but do you ever really think about this? Do you ever really ask yourself how different your life might be without these influences? Do you ever ask yourself how deep the hooks really go? Would you be shocked to find out how much of your life is shaped by the imagined opinions of strangers on the street? Would you be shocked to realize how much your mind is affected by a stream of pixels coming through a computer screen? How you ever thought about turning these things off? Can you even conceive of shutting these influences out?"