A few weeks ago I bought a sketchbook, sat down at my desk, and immediately felt that specific, paralyzing dread of ruining a perfectly clean notebook.
My first instinct was to stare at the blank page and wait for some wave of original artistic genius to wash over me. Spoiler: nothing happened. I just sat there looking at a piece of dead tree.
So I gave up on being a tortured visionary and did what felt like cheating. I pulled up drawings from artists I liked and started copying them, line for line, mistake for mistake.
Honestly, it felt like a relief.
We've been fed this idea that real creators sit in a room and conjure pure, untouched originality out of thin air, that copying is lazy and real talent means starting from scratch. But trying to invent everything yourself isn't noble. It's mostly ego.
I don't believe in sitting down and trying to reinvent the universe from scratch. I believe in the discipline of mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.
Artists have known this for centuries. Master painters used to spend years in museums, physically copying the works on the walls. They weren't stealing. They were building muscle memory.
Turns out you're also pretty bad at copying, and that's the actual relief. You never reproduce someone 100% perfectly, and that gap is where the interesting stuff happens. Your "unique style" isn't a spark you were born with. It's the weird, accidental distance between your rough attempt to copy Artist A and your slightly-better attempt to copy Artist B. Mix the two, run them through your own flawed hands, and you've accidentally made something new.
The same goes for pretty much everything outside a sketchbook. Building a business, writing a post, figuring out your life. Reinventing the wheel isn't impressive. It's just exhausting.
The smarter move isn't pretending you have all the answers. It's having the humility to steal the best playbooks already out there, practice them until they're second nature, and let your own style show up in the gaps.