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My daughter came home in tears yesterday. Her art teacher gave her a 'C' because her painting looked "too much like Monet."

It made me furious. Not because of the grade, but because of the lie.

We are taught that copying is cheating. We are told that "originality" is the only thing that matters.

This is the single dumbest thing we teach creative people.

I went down a rabbit hole for this week’s newsletter, and I found the receipts.

The Lesson: You don't find your voice by trying to be original. You find your voice by failing to copy your heroes perfectly.

Originality is just a "bad copy" that went right.

Let’s get dumb.

In 1974, they were trying to be The Beach Boys.

They wanted the harmonies. They wanted the surf vibes. But there was a problem: They couldn't play their instruments.

They couldn't play complex chords, so they played fast. They couldn't do surf rock, so they did buzzsaw rock.

In failing to copy The Beach Boys, they accidentally invented Punk.

Stop worrying about being original. Just try to copy your heroes. Your inability to do it perfectly? That’s your style.

But Shakespeare was actually the world's greatest thief.

Out of 37 plays, only TWO had original plots.

Romeo and Juliet? Stolen from a poem.

Macbeth? Lifted from a history book.

He even stole famous speeches word-for-word from translations of Plutarch. But that’s the point. He didn't invent the story… he improved the language.

You don't need to invent the wheel. You just need to spin it better.

In 1918, a guy named Masataka Taketsuru went to Scotland to steal their secrets. He wanted to make a perfect copy of Scotch in Japan. But he couldn't. The water was different. The wood was different. The climate was different. For decades, people laughed at it. But those 'failures' accumulated until the copy became its own thing. Now, Japanese Whiskey beats Scotch in taste tests. The lesson? Your 'failed' copy is your future original.

Dumb Word of the Day: Palimpsest — a manuscript that has been scraped clean and written over, but the old ghost layers remain.

If you're waiting for an original idea, you're going to be waiting forever.

Shakespeare stole his plots. The Ramones tried to copy the Beach Boys. Japanese Whiskey started as a copy of Scotch.

: a manuscript that has been scraped clean and written over, but the old ghost layers remain. That's what your work is.

Stop trying to be new. Start being a Palimpsest.

I want you to reply with one thing you are going to 'deliberately copy' this week.

Are you rewriting a Stephen King paragraph?

Are you re-coding a famous website?

Tell me who you are stealing from.