True, most new things come from someone else’s creation or re-creation. Blazed trails are much easier to explore.

However when you do something that others have done already, you can hardly open new markets or create new demand; you’re just picking up what others have left over in the dish.

Worst yet, you may successfully build a magnificent sand dune that falls overnight.

Creating new things instead of copying is difficult, maybe 10,000 times more, so you only have 1/10,000 chance to succeed. But once you make it, the payback could be more than you can imagine.

It’s not saying you are not supposed to build things on others’. Most of us do that everyday in the past of our lives.

The point is that in the process you need two things to be really successful: to learn, and to improve.

When you imitate, it’s not for the results but the journey. The best you would achieve by that is becoming someone’s shadow, or literally a carbon copy.

Learning is a passage, and you need to improve what you’ve learned to go farther. That makes copying meaningful and worthwhile. That’s the real success.