#Things to consider
- Copy your heroes and find out where you fall short. That’s what you should focus on and transform into your own work. You want to internalize your heroes way of looking at the world.
- Nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —André Gide
- Nobody is born with a style or a voice. You don’t come preconfigured, and you don’t know who you are. You have to create to figure all that out. You learn by copying your heroes.
- Copying is a practice. It’s different from plagiarism, which is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. And you steal from all your heroes, not just one. You steal the thinking behind the style, you learn to see like your heroes.
- Don’t worry about a unified vision for your work. Keep all of yourself. Just keep spending time with the things you love. They will start talking to each other and then interesting things will happen. One day, you will look back and it will all make sense.
- Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.