Robert Greene once made a point that has stuck with me, that imitation is really the starting point of originality, not the opposite of it. His way of putting it was simple. "Copy all the great masters, and then combine them anew."
If you think about it, all of humanity started with imitation. Warren Buffett, the greatest investor in the world, built his entire method squarely on top of Benjamin Graham's investment framework. Mohnish Pabrai, often called the Warren Buffett of India, built his investment philosophy directly on top of the methods used by Buffett and Charlie Munger.
None of these greats built their systems from scratch. They layered new knowledge and new techniques on top of the foundation laid by those who came before them. We have to do the same. This is especially true today, when the cost of acquiring knowledge is lower than at any other point in human history.
Why Imitation Is the Fastest Way to Learn Anything
Another reason imitation matters so much is that to learn anything at all, we need a baseline. From the moment we are born, we use our parents as that baseline, imitating them to absorb culture and language. This is exactly why successful people constantly urge you to find a personal mentor or a role model.
Regardless of your field, once you have built a minimum foundation of basic knowledge, finding someone you consider the very best in your industry is the fastest path to growth. You don't even need to meet them in person. Their insights and knowledge are already overflowing in books and across the internet.
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| Mohnish Pabrai explaining why he proudly calls himself a shameless cloner |
Mohnish Pabrai openly confessed that the biggest reason for his massive success was simply copying the frameworks of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger word for word, a perfect real-world example of why you must Stop Learning and Just Start Copying in the AI Age. His argument was that in the investment world, refusing to stand on the shoulders of people who already proved their methods work is just foolish pride. The phrase he uses for himself is the part that stuck with me. "I am a shameless cloner."
I believe that using a role model as a baseline and imitating them is more effective than any other method. That is actually the reason I created this blog. I want to think and make judgments like the greats, people like Sam Altman, Naval Ravikant, and Elon Musk. So I am constantly writing down my thoughts on how to directly apply their mental models and business frameworks to my own business and my own life.
Of course, this does not mean you should mindlessly steal your role model's thoughts. It means you should gather truly high-quality ingredients that will eventually become the raw material for your own originality, whether the final dish turns out to be a new mental model or a new business model.
You Don't Have to Be the Best at Any Single Thing
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, is a perfect example of someone who achieved outsized success by simply getting slightly better across several different fields.
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| Scott Adams explaining how combining average skills built the Dilbert empire |
Adams has explained that he is not a great artist, not a great writer, not even the funniest person in his own living room, and admits his business track record is far from perfect. But stacking a handful of merely decent skills together is exactly how he built something no single skill could have on its own. His summary of it stays with me. "I built the Dilbert empire, which is syndicated in 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries."
That is basically my own story too. I was never the sharpest engineer on my team, and I am not a naturally gifted writer either. But stacking an average technical background, a habit of testing my own AI projects, and a willingness to write about the mess in public turned into something none of those three skills could have done alone.
I honestly don't think you need to be the very best in any single field, a core philosophy I emphasized in
One day, you will look back and realize you have built something no one else could have built. That is exactly what I am chasing with this blog, stacking my own average skills until they add up to something singular. And whatever that is for you, no one else will be able to compete with it, because no one else in the world possesses the exact same combination of interests as you.
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