Imitate, Then Innovate
David Perell · 2022
"The fastest route to an original voice runs through deliberate imitation. Creators who make originality their highest virtue — Perell's 'Originality Disease' — produce less and sound like everyone else; those who copy their heroes and fail to match them end up unique."
Johnny Carson tried to copy Jack Benny, failed, and won six Emmys. David Letterman tried to copy Carson, failed, and became one of the great television hosts. Conan O'Brien, looking at the same lineage, concluded that 'it is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique'. David Perell calls the opposite instinct the Originality Disease: the modern creator's fear that studying anyone else's style will contaminate their own, so they spend far more time straining for novelty than apprenticing to the people they admire — and quality is the casualty.
Perell's evidence is that the people we treat as singular talents describe themselves as thieves. Tarantino: 'I steal from every single movie ever made.' George Lucas rewrote Star Wars to fit Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby to feel what writing that well was like; Kobe Bryant said all his moves were stolen. Creators consume differently from audiences — a director watches a film for how the score builds empathy and how a camera move foreshadows a plot turn, building a mental board of techniques to borrow. Perell traces the disease to three sources: a misunderstanding of inspiration as lightning that must strike an uncontaminated mind; academia's fetish for the 'nobody has written this before' box, which confuses originality with usefulness; and a post-Freudian, post-1960s turn inward that treats the self as the only legitimate source of answers. His fix is a two-step apprenticeship. Imitate closely enough to learn the machinery, then let your own inevitable deviations accumulate — a painting teacher he quotes defines an artist's voice as the delta between their style and the painter they emulate. Imitating from far afield works too: Thiel from Girard, Jobs from Star Trek.
What does Perell mean by the 'Originality Disease'?
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- Imitate, Then InnovateDavid Perell
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