Have you ever wondered whether you are an original thinker or a stochastic parrot? Everyone has been told once to not cheat and copy from others’ honest work during a school presentation, a university examination, a project submission, or a seminar about research ethics. Is not getting help during a presentation or not copying answers during an examination enough to make one an authentic, though? Is being an original thinker all about passing your exams with dignity? Is not getting caught by the plagiarism checking software after submitting your dissertation all it takes? Obviously, it is not that simple. If paraphrasing a godly amount of times made a person an original thinker, then what would make a stochastic parrot? It doesn’t quite fit, you see. Let’s start our journey by trying to understand the distinction between an invention and a discovery in science.
Invention or Discovery?
What is an invention? Invention is something you come up with that is helpful to represent your observations and/or intuitions, but is not a by-product of a rigorous logical reasoning process. Discovery, on the other hand, is something that is a true fact, which follows from rigorous logical reasoning. Ask yourself: Is 
(where 
and 
denote the adjacent sides, and 
denotes the hypotenuse in a right triangle on a 2D Euclidean space) an invention or a discovery? Did someone come up with this equality to merely ease our lives, or did this equality emerge from something else? The answer is obviously a discovery. But what invention led to this discovery? Well, it might have been many things, but certainly the invention of numbers is up there. Each time a scientific discovery is made, there needs to be a “scientific” invention behind it. The way you can look at it is that all the axioms of mathematics are inventions, and the rest (e.g., lemmas, theorems) are discoveries. Axioms are not proven by the definition, so you cannot discover them scientifically. You can only invent axioms scientifically by discovering them intuitively in the wild. However, I will stick to the scientific side of invention and discovery in this post for simplicity.
When a scientific discovery is made, we mainly associate the thing discovered with the person who discovered it and acknowledge others whose work contributed to the discovery indirectly. In other words, we don’t say the person who came up with the notion of natural numbers and basic arithmetic operations, such as addition and multiplication, owns the whole field of mathematics and therefore, is, without a doubt, more intelligent than every human being who ever lived after his/her time. In fact, the person who came up with numbers and operators could not have possibly thought of all the implications and consequences simply because his life span wouldn’t even be long enough to speak about all the implications internally using an inner voice. So, there is something about spending man-hours on something to deserve an association. However, it cannot be all that is required because otherwise, spending thousands of hours on paraphrasing others’ work would be worthy of an association. There needs to be something that gives the many hours being spent integrity.
The thing that makes a body of work crucial to the progress of science is novelty. Whether it is an invention or a discovery, there obviously needs to be a novelty in it. Otherwise, it is neither an invention nor a discovery, but rather a work of paraphrasing. Novelty isn’t necessarily a by-product of an invention; it can come out of a discovery since the human brain is not capable of knowing all the implications of, say, a set of axioms invented. So, even if it is a tautology, it can be the one previously unthought of. However, not all tautologies are “interesting” discoveries. For example, I can come up with an arithmetic expression 
that has never been thought of by anyone, but it wouldn’t be enough to make it an “interesting” discovery because people won’t be able to relate it to other scientific inventions or discoveries. While this funny expression may actually carry some significant meaning in the very far future, it is impossible to recognize it as an interesting discovery because it is a dangling node in the graph of scientific facts. The interestingness of something is a kind of synonym for its relevancy to other things. Coming up with something that is too relevant to many other findings makes the invention/discovery very interesting.
Original Thinker
Being an original thinker is not on a binary spectrum, where you either are or aren’t one. It is rather a matter of how much of an original thinker you are. Being an original thinker is not all about coming up with everything from scratch, either. An original thinker is someone who is an inventor or a discoverer; obviously, some level of novelty must be present in an original thinker’s work in both cases. An original thinker is someone who has many intuitions, most of which turn out to be false later on. An original thinker is someone who doesn’t follow the paths that lead somewhere already known. An original thinker is someone who explores many different (sometimes unrelated) branches on the path being followed; if the path is very linear, then the person is probably a faker. An original thinker is someone who is not afraid of diving into the first principles to have a better understanding. An original thinker is someone who tends to listen to his/her own gut feeling more than what others say. An original thinker is someone with perseverance and strong determination for achieving his/her ambitious goals. An original thinker is someone who always tries to do honest work with integrity and doesn’t cheat. An original thinker is someone who has a strong curiosity and a willingness to learn something new. An original thinker is someone who is capable of pursuing an idea/intuition even when that idea may have been considered boring or uninteresting by many other great people. An original thinker is someone who has the freedom of thought, capable of thinking about the imaginary, questioning the unquestionable, doubting the undoubtable, poking around the forbidden.
Now, you can see for yourself how many of these character traits you possess to get a rough feeling for your level of original thinking.