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.
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