Your influences should be wider than your genre. Painters can teach musicians. Chefs can teach coders.

Everybody inside a field reads the same references and arrives at the same solutions, which is why a field can go years without changing. Ideas that feel new usually came in from outside: a composer thinking about architecture, a cook thinking about colour theory. The transfer works because underlying problems repeat across materials, even when the vocabulary does not.

Spend an hour this week on something excellent from a field you do not work in. A cookbook, a building, a dance piece. Write down one principle from it, then apply that principle to your own work rather than copying the surface.