When it comes to innovating, counterintuitively, I think the surest way to producing something new and noteworthy is to start by replicating work you admire. If you're making music, first play the music from your favourite artists, then make music like theirs, and only when you've mastered that do you need to go your own way. If you admire Hemingway, practice writing like him and your own voice will likely develop by itself. Before helping develop cubism Picasso was first an accomplished artist.

It's easy to look at the best and think you have to be different. But standing up first makes it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.

What's more, copying is much lower pressure.

I learned this idea while working at Jump Associates

Replicate then innovate

It's an old, old Eastern story about some blind men who encounter an elephant. As the blind make sense of what each feels it's also a memorable illustration of how our own views are shaped by our subjective experience and, as so often, that we don't see the full picture. In various versions the men may argue over what it is, convinced they themselves must be right, or collaborate to identify the elephant together.

Most of our experience is somewhat like this. We rarely see the whole truth. When we stay humble and accept others' experience we give ourselves the chance to learn a little more.

The blind and the elephant

It's an old economists' joke. A person out walking at night comes across a man scrabbling on the floor under a lamppost. The man on the floor says he lost his keys. When asked when he dropped them he then replies, "Oh, I dropped them over there, but the light's better here."

It's an apt metaphor for how, if we're really honest with ourselves, sometimes we find ourselves working, or searching, or staying in the places where we find it easier rather than the places where we know we ought to be.

Looking under the lamppost