Copy first, create later
The natural path from imitation to creativity
We try to get our kids to spend as much time as possible learning with their hands. Not just developing physical skills, but finding joy in the act of making things.
My 9-year-old daughter exemplifies this in her crafting. Beyond the usual bracelets and beadwork, she's mastered the art of recreating makeup and skincare products from household materials. She'll spot the perfect cardboard shade from a cereal box, salvage clear plastic from packaging, and repurpose cotton from old toys. Without instruction, she creates functional replicas: cotton balls become springs, Sharpies recreate logos, wire for structure. Her fake spray bottles don't just look real — they work, too.
My son's the same way. A while back I built him a workbench. He'll join me when I'm out in the shop working on things, and pick through my scrap pile to work up his own creations. Swords, guns, ramps — 7-year-old boy stuff. He's got his own hand tools for doing the basics. When I watch him work, I notice him mimicking everything he sees me do. Without me showing him, he knew how to work the vise on his bench, how to hold the work with it so he can saw it up. Same with hammering, drilling screws, and using his tape measure.
One of the many amazing things about kids is watching them learn through this process in real-time. This got me thinking about how we learn things.
A phenomenal amount of our skills we acquire through pure mimicry. We observe, copy, and through trial and error, perfect our imitations.
Imitation is biological
We're hardwired by evolution to learn this way. The instructions for mimicry are embedded in our DNA.
Human beings are great imitators — from infancy through adulthood, we're primed to watch and mimic actions, facial expressions, language, and even emotions of those around us. This proclivity for imitation doesn’t arise incidentally; it's deeply embedded in our biology and cultural practices. By copying effective behaviors, individuals could rapidly adopt skills without needing to discover everything through slow trial-and-error. Evolutionarily, learning by direct experimentation is costly — errors can lead to injury, loss of resources, or even death in high-stakes contexts (like foraging or hunting).
Mimicry accelerates learning while minimizing the risk of dangerous mistakes.
There's also the social component. We're social animals living in close-knit communities. Imitation promotes shared norms, languages, and customs, strengthening cohesion. Groups with members who readily learn from each other innovate faster and preserve their hard-won collective knowledge across generations.
Tacit knowledge
When we learn how to learn in school, most of that time is spent learning explicit knowledge: the stuff we print in books to read and study. The modern age prizes this kind of abstract learning — and it should, but not at the expense of tacit knowledge, the kind learned through observation, imitation, and repetitive practice.
Think riding a bike, or reading a room. No printed manual will have you doing wheelies or deftly navigating a complex meeting of dynamic personalities. You simply have to experience certain skills to master them.
Mimicry accelerates this process.
Watching a Steph Curry jumper and mimicking his movement is like hitting the fast-forward button: it gets you roughly to the proper shooting mechanics in minutes. But hitting 50% of your shots from behind the arc? That takes thousands of repetitions.
Celtics guard Jayson Tatum accelerated his basketball talent as a kid by watching Kobe Bryant film on YouTube. But he became an all-star from the thousands of hours of refinement.
From copying to creativity
What about creative fields?
Copying someone else’s work sounds lame. Why not make something of your own?
I don't see copying as a cheat, though — it's a stepping stone to developing the senses for a craft. Copying builds the muscle for working with materials. It gives you a tacit understanding of what particular styles feel like.
The painter copying Van Gogh or the writer imitating Hemingway are accelerating their feel for the craft. It's hard to find your creative "voice" when you're also struggling to work with the fundamental elements themselves.
Hunter S. Thompson allegedly typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby in order to “see how it felt to write a masterpiece.”
Writer and entrepreneur Sam Parr talked about this recently, a technique for copywriting called "copywork":
I spent months just locked in a room doing this thing called copy hour, where for an hour or two a day, I would take the best sales letters of all time and I would copy them by hand. And you have to do it with a pen and paper, not typing it. I do it with pen and paper, and then I would learn the texture of the writing. And I would see the patterns of great writing — even writing that I didn't want to emulate — but I'm going to steal that from you, steal that from you, and I'm going to create my own voice. And I do that with writing, and I think that's the best way to learn, in my opinion.
There's a creative power in this sort of copying. It's like a workout for your craft. Like going to the gym, but instead of reps with barbells, it’s reps with sentences from C.S. Lewis or Stephen King. Enough reps and you start to build muscle for how certain styles or structures work well. Then, as Sam says, you start recombining and concocting your own recipes.
Power in practiced imitation
In our rush to be original, we often dismiss copying as somehow lesser than "true" learning. But mimicry isn't just a shortcut — it's fundamental to how we master skills. We see it in my daughter's creative reproductions, in my son's workbench discoveries, and in every artist who's traced the footsteps of masters before them.
The path to originality paradoxically begins with imitation. First, we copy to build competence. Then we understand. Finally, we create.
Each phase enriches the next, giving us both the technical foundation and creative ingredients to make something uniquely our own. Perhaps the greatest innovation is knowing when to imitate and when to invent.