When to Copy Work, When to Steal Work

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal" plays on a truth that whenever we build something new, we're really building upon what's currently there, and that ought to be acknowledged and embraced unashamedly.

The words copy and steal are playful and provocative, as they contradict a pure notion of creativity we all pretend is the case in public. The quote says actually, we all know privately how it really works, and it's OK!

Copy and steal are metaphors, of course, and stand for opposite ends of the scale in the creative process. Copy means to borrow an idea and apply it for its known useful results, where steal means to take ownership of an idea and extend it to create some novel result.

It's very important to note that while more skill is implied the further you go towards stealing, copying is not bad. On the contrary, it's explicitly good. The creative process involves a combination of both - an artist needs to do both. The question then becomes, when to copy and when to steal?

I used to work with someone who, when the team would discuss how to build a new product feature, would by default suggest finding a similar feature in a market leader's product and start by copying their approach.

This raised some eyebrows. When your job is to design and build product features, instinct tells you that taking this approach is not doing your job. Moreover it's intellectually dishonest, arguably immoral. Anyone can copy, but you're better than that - you can create!

But this person was smart and had the right idea. The counter instinct isn't wrong on the whole, just misapplied. You do have to create, you do have to steal and extend and bring your own edge. But that's really difficult and time consuming to do, and your budget for doing it is limited. You don't want to waste it on the mundane, which most of building something is - the dull, functional platform on which the interesting stuff sits.

You don't make a whole cake out of icing, and you don't even start there, you've got to make that sponge base first. That's exactly what this person was talking about - copying the same sponge any cake could use, then using our own creative talents as icing to make something uniquely great in the areas that mattered in our product's narrow niche.

What qualifies as mundane? As a rule of thumb, techniques or tactics for realising strategy - focused solutions to isolated problems that don't matter on their own, and can be reapplied for similar results without much dependency on context. If your goal is creating something new in the world, don't copy strategy. Steal strategy! Copy tactics to get the platform in place to realise that strategy, then focus all your creative energy there.

Get out of the mindset of copying being a fallback when you've failed creatively, start using copying as a pragmatic tool to facilitate creative success.

Smart artists know when to copy and when to steal.