Sir Isaac Newton once wrote “if I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” If any thinkers can be called original, Newton can. He radically reimagined the nature of our physical world. And yet he had to admit that most of the progress he made was a matter of imitating what others had already accomplished. If that’s true for Newton, it’s definitely true for the rest of us. In most cases, people need to learn from those who have already mastered a given skill, before they can add their own creative, original spin to it. This is true, first of all, because finding your own way to mastery, without the help of a teacher, is generally inefficient. This inefficiency only slows down the process of learning, delaying the moment when one can begin to innovate. Secondly, teachers often model success for us, and thus inspire us to pursue mastery.

For instance, when Steve Jobs set out to create a truly innovative phone, he did not lock himself away and simply invent every aspect of the Iphone from scratch. Rather, he looked for models. He first learned what had already been done, observing things like touch screen phones, or more generally, the whole collection of ideas and technologies that had been employed by prior cell phone makers. After he had absorbed all of this information, learning from the achievements of others, he added his own original contributions. If he had attempted to figure all of this out for himself, he would have died long before creating anything like an Iphone.

Even before we succeed at a given task, we need to be inspired to try. This very often happens by means of observing someone who already does that task well. For instance, many artists who end up being original and famous get their start by seeing the works of a famous artist. That experience  is what makes them want to go into art themselves.  Originality is indeed something we ought to prize, but we should recognize that in the vast majority of cases, originality only occurs after a long phase of imitation. For most of us, this is the only way that we will ever be able to truly add something new and valuable to the world.