With a little help from my friends

I was with some friends last night doing a little uking.
Jon is a way better player than the rest of us but he holds us together as a group and stretches us with new songs. I was grateful for him showing me AGAIN the finger patterns for "12th Street Rag" (I'm a 'show-me-3-times' learner)
However Jon also unwittingly gave me a couple of other valuable insights last night....

We were talking about the cigarbox uke project (he was at the symposium and is also making one) and he started to tease me about trying to pretend that I'd made my neck by disguising any reference to Ohana. I was quite surprised - it hadn't ever crossed my mind that anyone might suppose that that was my intention - it just goes to show that you can't assume that other people think like you.
What I AM trying to do is 'make it my own'. And this lead me to think (again) about ownership of ideas...... If someone comes up with an interesting idea (lets say for example, Ohana's neck style) and I modify it (lets say by removing their label and reshaping some of their features) - is it still an Ohana neck? or is it now a Tim neck? If I go and customise a ford fiesta, is it my design or fords for supplying the donor vehicle?
One of the things I teach in my work is the notion of ADOPT, ADAPT, CREATE. When organisations get a bee in their bonnet about being more innovative, they can sometimes get a little too enthusiastic about invention, and when this happens, when faced with a challenge or an opportunity they feel they have to invent new solutions. This can be very inefficient, especially if a good enough solution already exists somewhere. And so we encourage people to first of all become better 'scouts' for solutions (by looking within or beyond their own industry/culture/country etc), and if a good-enough solution does exist, then ADOPT it. If someone somewhere has already addressed something similar, then maybe you can ADAPT it. And if there really is no solution anywhere, then you have to CREATE one.
I think what I am doing with my Ohana neck is adapting it to suit my needs - which are purely aesthetic - I dont want it to look like everyone elses (which I think is similar to simply customising your bog-standard car) - I'm certainly not trying to pretend that I carved the neck from a lump of wood.

And then there was a major break through for me when Jon mentioned that he had already glued his cigarbox shut. I asked him if he'd put a lable inside as a 'makers mark'. His answer switched a lightbulb on in my head.
I had a plan that I was going to create a logo and lable and put it on the headstock and inside the sound box (as a luthier would do) and I was going to put my headstock logo on with a printable decal paper - which meant ordering some..... and i hadnt got round to that yet..... which meant I couldnt make the lable..... which meant i couldnt finish off the inside of the box..... which meant that the project was pretty well on hold.
When Jon said that he wasn't bothered about a lable and simply just signed the inside of the box before closing it - I suddenly realised that I was being too focused on one idea, and that I couldnt make progress until that idea was implemented - as soon as I let go of that idea/feature, I felt like the barriers were down and I could make progress once again.
Its interesting how we can trap ourselves simply by not looking beyond our noses