In any field of endeavor, it is impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement

In any field of endeavor one aims to make influential contributions. Although, being creative is a prerequisite for this purpose, knowing about the prior accomplishments is an important factor as well. Personally, I believe that today, without knowing and thinking enough about the past of field it is not likely to make such contributions.

Perhaps hundreds of years ago artists, scientist and people in other careers tended to sit in their homes and come up with some innovative ideas to improve the quality of their work. And later these ideas played an important role to initiate the basics of that field. However, the knowledge of the today’s world is notably specialized. In every journal about science, history, art, etc you will see that people cite to each other's works and try to proceed a step further by improving previous works. In fact, there is no contribution which has been made independent from previous achievements.

Another reason is that if you tryto find new ideas without being aware of previous knowledge, you will end up repeating other’s mistakes. When you try to propose something new, you face many difficulties and if you don't know how these obstacles were surmounted in the past you will just repeat previous mistakes in order to make progress and tackle with the difficulties. Besides, it might occur that your work does not receive the credit it deserves, because it resembles some previous work that you weren't aware of its existence.

Still one could say that remaining in the history of a field could inhibit you creativity and will not allow you to think out of the box. But, I would say that being influenced by previous works does not necessarily mean to confirm or continue those works. Einstein and Newton could make great breakthroughs in the field of physics because they managed to see what all previous works could not. They realized the common weakness and point of failure in prior attempts and therefore could expand their imagination to find what was outside that box of failure.

All in all, when your goal is to make a worthwhile contribution in a field, first you need to understand where the boundary of that field is. By knowing the present dead ends in a field you will succeed in recognizing the true demand of the field and eventually you could apply your power of creativity along with your through knowledge about the past of the field, in order to satisfy that demand.