As I’ve had quite some free time the last few weeks since I am in between jobs, I’ve had more time for hobbies. My son is starting school soon so I had to go to one of those shops in Berlin to buy school stuff, and on the spot I decided to buy some stuff for myself too, a sketchbook, some pens etc.
As I sat down at my desk and opened the sketchbook, I felt a sort of paralysis. A perfectly clean blank page, how the hell should I start?
I was waiting for a miracle to happen, some wave of creativity to pour over me. Of course nothing happened. I gave up waiting and decided to cheat, or that’s how it felt. I looked up some drawing tutorials on YouTube and Google, found some sketches I liked and started copying them, line for line, mistake for mistake.
Honestly, it felt like a relief.
There is this notion, maybe coming out of the movies, that real artists/creators are these magical geniuses for whom originality and authenticity pour out the moment they sit in a room and start creating something. Maybe that is true for some of them, I would guess that less than 1% have that. We also believe that by copying you can’t create real art, but I assure you that trying to invent everything original is neither easy nor noble, it’s mostly ego.
I don’t believe in sitting down and trying to reinvent the universe from scratch. Why not try to learn 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. This practice over and over creates muscle memory and eventually helps develop a personal style. In practice, it turns out most of us are not that great at copying, and that’s actually good. 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 attempt to copy Artist A and your slightly better attempt to copy Artist B. Mix the two, run them through your own hands, and you’ve accidentally made something new.
The same goes for pretty much everything outside a sketchbook. Developing your career, raising your kid, figuring out your life. It’s not smart to pretend that we have all the answers, it’s also not smart to learn only from our own mistakes and successes. What’s smart is to be humble enough to steal the best playbooks, practice them until they become second nature and use them in your own style.
Reinventing the wheel isn’t impressive, it’s just exhausting.
