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Imitate, Then Innovate
- the-dude 5y agoOne has to be intimately acquaintaned with the field to be able to recognize if you are original in the first place. This was what I was taught in school.
- DocTomoe 5y agoThe whole concept of "originality" does not make sense to me, tbh. Who cares? If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon rainforest, with no contact to the outside world, come up with a movable-type-style contraption to impress patterns onto woven cloth, that's a creative thought - and your fellow tribe would consider it "original", even though you do not know that a few hundred years earlier, some guy in central Europe had that idea before (and some Chinese guy even earlier). You are in no way less an inventor if you come up with something that has been thought of before, but forgotten. We should start celebrating creativity (new ideas) instead of originality (uniquely new ideas). The quest for proving or disproving prior art is ultimately not moving us as a society forward.
- the-dude 5y agoSure, everybody should get a prize.
- tom_ 5y agoPeople respond to incentives!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dTal 5y agoNot to mention that someone having "thought of that" at some prior point isn't a good reason not to explore it from your own perspective; your predecessors were not perfect or all-knowing.
- ffhhj 5y ago> Who cares? > If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon rainforest... Actually, there is a creativity's dark side that could makes us care. Members of a tribe will perform their gathering and hunting tasks, and achieve some degree of creativity on tools, organization and processes to optimize their resources and live happily. Creativity is nice up to this point. Now imagine what happens when they create this powerful idea, of building a pyramid of ash, so they burn all the trees around. And this have actually happened on different cultures. Behold our pyramid of ash: consumerism!
- bluepizza 5y agoNaive question - maybe someone has an interesting point of view. Wouldn't "imitate then innovate" just lead us to very efficient horse carriages instead of cars?
- jmmcd 5y agoI guess the author's response would be no, it would still give us cars, but they would have good wheels instead of square ones.
- moring 5y agoI don't think so, for two reasons. First, a lot of things one the way from a horse carriage to a car are actually the same, like wheels and seats. They diverge later on. Second, the article promotes innovating from other fields, not your own field. That might mean a carriage moved by a steam engine, for example, which also brings you closer to a car.
- _dain_ 5y ago>That might mean a carriage moved by a steam engine, for example, which also brings you closer to a car. they made those! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car#History
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI believe Archie of Riverdale's car was originally depicted as one of those!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mro_name 5y agothat's exactly what it started with and developed stepwise from then. Look at Gottlieb Daimler's motor-carriage of 1886: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlieb_Daimler#/media/Datei:Stuttgart-cannstatt-daimler-kutsche-1886.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlieb_Daimler#/media/Datei:...
- jmmcd 5y agoResearch isn't mentioned, but this is good advice for research too. If you want to make a contribution to research you have to know the field, and be able to re-implement what others have done, before you can add anything.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThis would also elegantly solve the reproduction crisis that now plagues many sciences at once.
- kitd 5y agoThe format I was taught is: Imitate, inculcate, innovate ie. you need to spend time imitating others, but then more time totally grokking it to fully appreciate the whys, costs, & benefits of the old approach before trying to innovate past it.
- robaato 5y agoJapanese have the concept of the stages of shu/ha/ri. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari This applies to learning martial arts, but to many other disciplines, e.g. in software engineering: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-blog/shuhari-agile-adoption-pattern https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-b... I am a long time practitioner of Aikido, and it certainly applies to that. A very common trap for many is to attempt ha/ri when they have not mastered shu.
- ArcMex 5y ago>To me, the idea of Shu Ha Ri provides thinking tools, a language and a frame of reference to approach learning a new skill. When you are first learning something, variety of ideas isn’t usually the most helpful place to start. Once you get the basics down, then move on to experimenting and looking to integrate new thoughts or ideas. Your experiments will lead you to new paths and eventually you’ll move beyond the specific practices and evolve your own way of doing things. That is a good summary.
- xarope 5y agoBruce Lee's famous quote: “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”
- nickpeterson 5y agoWhat’s the old joke about asking more and more technical people how a light switch works and the child’s explanation at the beginning and the physicists at the end are identical but in between becomes horrendously complicated…
- teddyh 5y agoChop wood, carry water.
- WJW 5y ago“Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
- leroman 5y agoI'm bootstrapping a SaaS business with the same approach, I've been imitating and iterating over what I see other's have been doing, while trying to be original (but very conservative) in some parts. Hopefully, when I decide the imitation part is good enough (mostly in terms of feature parity), I add one of my more original ideas for a feature to the product.
- pfarrell 5y agoI cofounded a startup a few years ago that ended in an acquihire. If I could redo it, I realize we didn’t front load a killer feature. We spent too much time on table stakes so we’d look like competitors, there wasn’t much that set us apart to endear us to the alpha user base. We only developed some really novel things after like nine months. Looking back (and for next time), I’d have greatly descoped what we needed to imitate and gotten on those killer features asap.
- leroman 5y agoThanks for sharing!
- mro_name 5y ago"Talent borrows, genius steals" being attributed to Oscar Wilde but being possibly stolen as well :-) At least Goethe (the german shakespeare if you will) said quite the same in the 18th century.
- the-dude 5y agoDude. This is HN. The only right answer is Jobs.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoAlso attributed to Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky.
- ArcMex 5y agoWhenever I am learning something with zero knowledge, certainly, I imitate. As I gain more knowledge, I start to see patterns that allow me to branch out. I feel like this is a natural progression of things.
- yxhuvud 5y agoWhile I agree that imitation is a preferred way to greatness, > Modern creators do the opposite though. Make me react with [Citation needed]. The article sets up to defeat a big straw man and doesn't spend enough effort motivating why it is supposed to be true (or for that matter, different to how it was before).
- wmeredith 5y ago> Modern creators do the opposite though. I feel like this thesis is confirmation bias at work. How many mediocre renaissance painters have you heard of? How many are possible to even have heard of? I'd guess not many. I still really like the rest of this piece.
- mb_72 5y ago"Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - credited to jazz trumpeter Clark Terry (b 1920), so hardly a new concept. Also, these days I see a lot of content creators only making it to the first stage, mindlessly aping others or creating short-form unoriginal material for TikTok etc; being 'original' seems not really to be a priority.
- lancesells 5y agoI think there's two reasons that things seem less original these days: Prior to the internet that first stage was hidden from view until someone made it to the second stage. Digital tools have made creation accessible to pretty much everyone with the technology. I'm not sure I know TikTok content too well but I think it's a good thing that people are creating a little more than consuming. Even if it's a blatent copy of something else.
- HWR_14 5y agoAre most TikTok posters even trying to create something? My understanding is the majority are trying to participate in a trend or show off to peers.
- thenerdhead 5y agoIt’s a long fluffy article that doesn’t even include the source of the famous quote. Miles Davis said this and would reference how important the fundamentals are to any instrument like the drums: “Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it's like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.” The author definitely knows how to optimize SEO, but not even googling their own title of an article and including one of the more famous examples seems a bit odd to me. There’s quite some claims that modern creators are afraid to imitate each other? Has the author opened up TikTok, YouTube, or copied a popular tweet into Google to see the thousands of copycats getting the same recognition in their own bubbles of the world?
- thenerdhead 5y agoFor those unfamiliar "ape" means to imitate here and "in the pocket" means to have fun with it / feel comfortable performing.
- lioeters 5y ago> In _The Jazz Theory Book_, Mark Levine defines playing in the pocket simply as grooving, where the rhythm section is locked in and working as a unit. > in the pocket - When the music is rhythmically in a groove. > groove - The “lock” between members of a rhythm section playing well together.
- potta_coffee 5y ago"In the pocket" has to do with a certain feeling or "groove" that occurs when the bass player and drummer sort of "lock in" (that's my terminology). I definitely know when I'm "in the pocket" but it's one of those things that's difficult to describe.
- adrianthedev 5y agoThat's what we did with Avo. We started to create a Laravel Nova clone because we found its utility immense. Somewhere along the way, we figured out that our users have different needs, and the whole project pivoted to something else, becoming a unique product in itself that better serves our users than we initially thought. Without imitating the original, we wouldn't have come up with this wonderful product that helps teams save tons of time. https://avo.cool https://avo.cool
- jasfi 5y agoThat looks really cool indeed! I might do something similar for the UI framework I'm working on: https://nexusdev.tools/ https://nexusdev.tools/
- evancoop 5y agoAdmittedly, the alliterative title is catchy. Curious if what occurs in the learning process is really "pattern recognition," then innovation. When a child learns to play the piano, are they "imitating" Bach and Beethoven or recognizing patterns of chord progressions? When a child learns to read/write, they are probably not imitating childhood authors per se, rather, learning patterns in how words are assembled. Perhaps, creativity is simply an extension of the same process. Recognize pleasing patterns, learning which can be broken, and assembling those patterns in a new way?
- mlvljr 5y ago
- karmakaze 5y agoTalks about a lot of things about being original. Found it a fun read and this one struck a chord with me: > The alternative is a pursuit towards truth. In the words of C.S. Lewis, who is famous for the vivid imagination he presented in stories like the Chronicles of Narnia: “No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original—and doesn’t notice it.” I find a parallel working in technical problem where a good solution comes from getting to understand the problem in fundamental ways and the most basic representation and process to solve it imaginable with that understanding is called creative or original. The goal was never to 'be clever', in fact 'thinking dumb' as in "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" is far more effective.
- going_ham 5y agoThere is this video of Steve job's quoting, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." [0] That one hits me the most. To steal an idea you really have to understand it and find ways to integrate into the system and design. Copying is really straightforward. [0]: https://youtu.be/a6jeZ7m0ycw https://youtu.be/a6jeZ7m0ycw
- bluesmoon 5y agoBack in the 90s the Microsoft version was "Embrace and Extend" which really meant, adopt a standard and then change it so that the original implementation no longer works.
- say_it_as_it_is 5y agoWere the elements about Collison and Stripe necessary for this essay? I don't see what value these parts add. The conclusion that Stripe is original by not being original confirms that these parts don't belong to an essay about innovation. Collison is an intriguing person, though, and Stripe's focus on developer UX for payment processing was innovative, but maybe focusing on the actual innovation would have been too unoriginal to write about in 2022? Maybe writing about who Collison was imitating would have been more relevant.
- gnat 5y agoRe: the story at the start about watching a movie with a director and seeing them look at the movie different than the author did: I heard a great workshop by Chris Thile, MacArthur genius grant recipient and mandolin player. He said "we argue about this in the band, but I feel like once you're a serious musician, you can't ever enjoy music like lying back in the spa pool and letting it wash over you. You're always going `how does this make me feel? what about it is making me feel that way? how is it constructed? what's similar to other music i've heard? what's different?'." We shouldn't be surprised that a creator's knowledge of a product exceeds that of the consumer. We should expect that we'll need to acquire that level of expertise and critical thought about a problem or solution space to be effective in the world.