Imitate, Then Innovate
perell.com
perell.com
> The alternative is a pursuit towards truth. In the words of C.S. Lewis, who is famous for the vivid imagination he presented in stories like the Chronicles of Narnia: “No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original—and doesn’t notice it.”
I find a parallel working in technical problem where a good solution comes from getting to understand the problem in fundamental ways and the most basic representation and process to solve it imaginable with that understanding is called creative or original. The goal was never to 'be clever', in fact 'thinking dumb' as in "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" is far more effective.
“Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it's like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.”
The author definitely knows how to optimize SEO, but not even googling their own title of an article and including one of the more famous examples seems a bit odd to me.
There’s quite some claims that modern creators are afraid to imitate each other? Has the author opened up TikTok, YouTube, or copied a popular tweet into Google to see the thousands of copycats getting the same recognition in their own bubbles of the world?
In the first half, he is mainly referring to the current state of fine-arts, which is still in the grip of the "originality disease". It's a different way of describing a particularly outgrowth of modernism, the rejection of bourgeois values, which included conformity, propriety, and the existence of objective truth and beauty. The horrors of World War 1 were the turning point, how could something so grotesque arise in the pinnacle of civilization after all. The author mentions the influence of Freud's work, which absolutely demolished the collective psychic order, turning everybody into a neurotic.
Interesting too, is that he really highlights the self-absorption which underlies modern/contemporary "high" fine arts. That criticism is not new. The first real critical assault on modernism was in the seventies. However, it didn't stick, instead it turned ideals of bourgeois respectability into a form of pageantry. Think a critic like Tom Wolfe as an anachronistic dandy, or the weird Lego-classicism of postmodern skyscrapers. But the core of that criticism stands though: a half-century later, and we have still not overcome the absolute degeneration of artistic production.
I hope to see by the end of my lifetime that we have dug out of this hole, and art is unabashedly the pursuit of truth and beauty again. That will require artists and their patrons to stop navel-gazing though.
> in the pocket - When the music is rhythmically in a groove.
> groove - The “lock” between members of a rhythm section playing well together.
I don't think a slew of bullet points could have accomplished the same.
Give foolishness a break, at least for a week.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349222 | I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic (kg.dev)
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/critic-is-a-four-lett...
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/2553/the-benefit-of-doub...
This applies to learning martial arts, but to many other disciplines, e.g. in software engineering:
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-b...
I am a long time practitioner of Aikido, and it certainly applies to that. A very common trap for many is to attempt ha/ri when they have not mastered shu.
That is a good summary.
This was what I was taught in school.
If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon rainforest, with no contact to the outside world, come up with a movable-type-style contraption to impress patterns onto woven cloth, that's a creative thought - and your fellow tribe would consider it "original", even though you do not know that a few hundred years earlier, some guy in central Europe had that idea before (and some Chinese guy even earlier). You are in no way less an inventor if you come up with something that has been thought of before, but forgotten.
We should start celebrating creativity (new ideas) instead of originality (uniquely new ideas). The quest for proving or disproving prior art is ultimately not moving us as a society forward.
Actually, there is a creativity's dark side that could makes us care. Members of a tribe will perform their gathering and hunting tasks, and achieve some degree of creativity on tools, organization and processes to optimize their resources and live happily. Creativity is nice up to this point. Now imagine what happens when they create this powerful idea, of building a pyramid of ash, so they burn all the trees around. And this have actually happened on different cultures.
Behold our pyramid of ash: consumerism!
At least Goethe (the german shakespeare if you will) said quite the same in the 18th century.
While he isn't the only one to use the phrase "funding secured" has been linked to him in a way "one more thing" was linked to Jobs.
> Modern creators do the opposite though.
Make me react with [Citation needed]. The article sets up to defeat a big straw man and doesn't spend enough effort motivating why it is supposed to be true (or for that matter, different to how it was before).
I feel like this thesis is confirmation bias at work. How many mediocre renaissance painters have you heard of? How many are possible to even have heard of? I'd guess not many.
I still really like the rest of this piece.
Somewhere along the way, we figured out that our users have different needs, and the whole project pivoted to something else, becoming a unique product in itself that better serves our users than we initially thought.
Without imitating the original, we wouldn't have come up with this wonderful product that helps teams save tons of time.
I'm not sure I know TikTok content too well but I think it's a good thing that people are creating a little more than consuming. Even if it's a blatent copy of something else.
We shouldn't be surprised that a creator's knowledge of a product exceeds that of the consumer. We should expect that we'll need to acquire that level of expertise and critical thought about a problem or solution space to be effective in the world.
Imitate, inculcate, innovate
Perhaps, creativity is simply an extension of the same process. Recognize pleasing patterns, learning which can be broken, and assembling those patterns in a new way?
Hopefully, when I decide the imitation part is good enough (mostly in terms of feature parity), I add one of my more original ideas for a feature to the product.
We spent too much time on table stakes so we’d look like competitors, there wasn’t much that set us apart to endear us to the alpha user base. We only developed some really novel things after like nine months. Looking back (and for next time), I’d have greatly descoped what we needed to imitate and gotten on those killer features asap.
Wouldn't "imitate then innovate" just lead us to very efficient horse carriages instead of cars?
But early cars WERE based on horse carriages; they literally did NOT reinvent the wheel, but instead strapped a combustion engine onto a horse carriage. Then did they start - or continue - innovation with things like suspension, tires, brakes, and later on safety systems etc.
Second, the article promotes innovating from other fields, not your own field. That might mean a carriage moved by a steam engine, for example, which also brings you closer to a car.
they made those!
Look at Gottlieb Daimler's motor-carriage of 1886: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlieb_Daimler#/media/Datei:...