2006: I was in a café in Bangkok, Thailand. Surrounded by comfortable couches, was a neat pile of coffee table books for people to thumb through. One of them was an older interior design book with bits of tape sticking out. The book had a bunch of cool looking projects with some theme tying them together. Not instructional, just pictures with short blurbs. Like Behance, but on paper.
I flipped to a bookmarked page. The image looked just like the cash register area. I turned to another, which was clearly the inspiration for the tables and chairs. In particular, I remember the word clouds on the walls. It was as close a copy as possible to one of the projects in the book, except that project was for a lobby or something, so they took the style, but changed all the words to be café related. I had found them out! These cafe people were copycats. I was better than them, I had originality.
Instead of being so smug, I wish I had appreciated what they did. They took a book of pictures, found a bunch of ideas they could use, and then turned it into a real business. Sorry to bury the lead, but that’s the 1 simple trick. Copying. If you can copy, you can do anything. Here are a few reasons why:
Copying is How We Learn
To copy something we have to be able to observe a result, infer a process, and then perform experiments to see if our understanding matches the source. This is something we all innately do. When we were babies, we learned how to speak by copying the sounds the adults made.
100 people copying the same source material would lead to 100 different results. We all copy from a vantage point given to us by family, peers, institutions, and general life circumstance. This doesn’t mean that our creativity is out of our control. What we choose to copy becomes part of our tastes and technical abilities. By copying, we apply intention to our creative inputs. Far from limiting our creativity, copying is how we develop it.
Artists learn their craft by copying other artists. They even have a fancy name for it: Master Studies. Musicians learn by copying certain works of music to the point of muscle memory. Surgeons learn by copying procedures until they can repeat them well enough to be trusted to do it in a living human body. What makes a professional is their ability to draw upon internal libraries of knowledge hard coded in them through repetition.
Copying Builds community
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Think of all the cover songs and fan art out there in the world. They exist because people like the source material so much that they were willing to spend time and effort recreating it. This act of celebration brings new attention to both the copy and the source.
Plagiarism is a bad form of copying. The plagiarist prospers by diverting attention away from the source and to the stolen work. It denies the existence of the source material by replacing it. In practice, it is hard to differentiate the two. A well-intentioned copy can be misinterpreted as theft, while plagiarism is often as profitable as it is scummy.
Despite the risk of plagiarism, the only thing worse than copying is not copying. Without it, the exchange of ideas doesn’t happen, or at most, only on a surface level. A community that doesn’t copy each other is a group of self-absorbed individuals, from which any kind of culture is unlikely to emerge.
Copying Leads to Innovation
We tend to copy either to learn or to solve a problem. If it is to learn, then we are building our internal library of solutions to be applied to future problems. If it is to solve a problem, we have to learn in order to apply what we are copying in a productive way.
At some point, the thing that we are copying may no longer be sufficient to solve the problem at hand. We need to make things up by remixing ideas from our internal library of copied stuff. By doing so, we enter some unknown territory where we’re not just copying but inventing something new.
Newness for newness’ sake is not innovation, it’s novelty. To be innovative, something has to be both new and useful. Through the discipline of copying, we find the new only when it is necessary, and pursue it with the same rigor with which we do anything else.