So you want to create something: a book, a movie, pictures, a recipe, a Youtube channel, a company.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking that your ideas should be original, 100% yours, never seen before.
When you think you have to have absolutely original ideas, you get stuck, you don’t progress and maybe you quit your project all together.
I get it: you consider yourself creative and creative people, create. Or you don’t consider yourself creative at all. So how do you kickstart your creativity?
The best way to start? Just copy.
Start by imitating others: copy their style, copy their content, copy their marketing assets, copy their recipes. Just copy.
Eventually, and sometimes pretty soon, you will find something that you don’t like and that doesn’t fit with your personality and you will want to change that.
You will start adding your own point of view and you will feel like it’s your own creature.
And that’s where you will start to steal. You will take what you like and adapt it to yourself.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” – Pablo Picasso
When I started taking pictures, I used to spend hours and hours on just two websites: Magnum Photos com and VII Agency.
At the beginning, I used to scroll through every single photographer, go to his/her portfolio and simply click on all the pictures.
I think I’ve probably spent 1 or 2 hours every night for a few years, studying thousands of picture.
Often times I went back to my favorite photographers: Alex Webb, Manuel Rio Branco, David Alan Harvey, Paolo Pellegrin, Alex Majoli, Jonas Bendiksen, Joachim Ladefoged.
I would then try and simply copy their style. I never reached their level obviously, but eventually, I started developing my own style and my pictures were a bit better. They helped me kickstart my own creativity and shown a direction.
“Like a funhouse mirror that distorts what it reflects, your imitation will turn out much different from the original. Maybe even better”
Derek Sivers
It’s everywhere
Once you understand that copying (or stealing) is the basis of every creative pursuit you will start seeing everywhere.
Just take a look at some of the people that are regarded as top creative minds:
Johnny Ive and Dieter Rams
Design has played a big part in the success of Apple and we know consider the style of their product as real masterpieces that stand out from the competition. The simple design of their products seems to be part of Apple’s DNA, something never seen before. But if we just go back in time a few years, we will find another company having the exact same approach.
Dieter Rams has been THE inspiration for Johnny Ive. I mean, take a look at this picture.
Banksy and Blek le Rat
There’s one artist that stands out head and shoulder above any other street artist. Banksy is now celebrated as the most famous street artist with his unique approach and extensive use of stencils.
Unless you are a street artist historian, you will really think Bansky work is absolutly original and never seen before.
Born in France in 1952, Xavier Prou is best know as Blek le Rat and is one of the god-father of stencil street art. Here’s him in front of one of his stencils.
Here’s a quote from Banksy.
Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier
Banksy
Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone
The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West.
Quentin Tarantino
Roy Lichtenstein and ’50s Comics
The best part is that each of these creative minds aknowledge their original source of their creativity.
Look around you: who do you admire? whose work do you like? Start by copying.