Getting lost in Leo Tolstoy’s words and cadence helps you start to understand the world he’s imagining in Anna Karenina. Now feel the difference when you let Toni Morrison’s words transport you in Beloved:
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me and all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you’ve got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Neither of these may be your preferred writing style, but by inhabiting these authors’ words, their rhythm, their worlds, you not only emulate masters of the craft but also expand and develop your own voice. When you immerse yourself in great writing, you’re not trying to become Tolstoy or Morrison. You’re developing an ear for how language can move and breathe.
It’s like learning a new instrument. You begin by playing others’ songs, not to perform them forever, but to understand how music works. This takes the pressure off because you’re not expected to create something entirely new. Instead, you’re giving yourself time to absorb, understand, and eventually transform those influences into something that feels true to you. The goal is to comprehend—to grasp how these masters achieve their effects—so you can begin to discover your own path.
More than just imitators, we are sense makers. We don’t merely copy others. We need to understand why.
Artist Austin Kleon captures this beautifully in his book Steal Like an Artist, where he highlights the virtues of imitation. “Free from the burden of trying to be completely original,” he reminds us, we can “embrace influence instead of running away from it.”
But more than motivation, Kleon describes imitation as a critical learning tool—a way to reverse engineer the creations of our heroes, “much like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.”
Kleon is correct that imitation has deep roots in how we learn. Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed that imitation is fundamental to how we come to understand the world around us. But human imitation isn’t mechanical or thoughtless. More than just imitators, we are sense makers. We don’t merely copy others. We need to understand why.
Consider an ingenious set of experiments conducted by a team of cognitive scientists at Yale University, spearheaded by Derek Lyons and my PhD mentor, Frank Keil. The researchers presented toddlers with elaborate puzzle contraptions that contained prizes. When shown how to open the puzzles, children copied all the steps, even unnecessary ones. But they weren’t copying blindly. When given a choice between a cumbersome way to perform an action and a more direct one, they consistently chose efficiency. They weren’t just mimicking movements. They were trying to understand the underlying purpose.
When we imitate other people’s creative work, we are forming a theory about their process—why they made certain decisions and how their creative choices relate to one another. Take Mondrian’s grid paintings, for example. If you tried to create one yourself, you might start by drawing some black lines and filling in squares with primary colors. But then, you’d begin to notice subtle decisions he made. How thick should the lines be? How many squares? Why do some colored sections feel more balanced than others? Through this process of careful imitation, you would gain insights into the underlying principles that guided his work.
This act of deeply studying others, trying to recreate their work, is what I call high-resolution Surveying. Low-resolution Surveying involves gathering surface-level information about a wide variety of topics—knowing a little about a lot of stuff. This can be useful too, as we’ll see in the next chapter. But high-resolution Surveying—gathering exhaustive and detailed information about a very narrow topic—is the key to unlocking the learning potential of imitation. For example, you might focus on the work of a single person or even a specific portion of a person’s career.
Many creative endeavors are essentially problem-solving exercises, where each step reveals new possibilities and challenges. And our unconscious mind often understands these patterns before we can articulate them. Like an iceberg, much of our creative processing happens beneath the surface. But by walking around in the mind of someone else and shadowing their creative steps, you’re developing the necessary tools that will eventually guide you to your own discoveries.
Effective Surveying—knowing where to look for successful ideas—requires balancing convention with novelty.
Korean cinema offers a fascinating example of this approach in action. From the 1960s through the late 1980s, the Motion Picture Law severely restricted what South Korean filmmakers could produce, while simultaneously limiting the import of foreign films. This created an unusual dynamic. Aspiring filmmakers found themselves studying a limited selection of foreign films with intense focus and dedication. This period of intense study laid the groundwork for what would later become known as the Korean New Wave. When censorship finally began to ease in the 1990s, Korean filmmakers emerged with a profound understanding of cinematic storytelling. They began creating what became known as “well-made” films—a term that reflected both their technical polish and their clever adaptation of proven narrative structures.
These films often took familiar genres or plot structures but then told those stories through a distinctly Korean lens. Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), for instance, worked within the revenge thriller genre but infused it with uniquely Korean themes about shame and family honor. Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) used the serial killer genre to explore the country’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy. Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005) drew on the cool aesthetics of Jean-Pierre Melville’s gangster films while examining specifically Korean concepts of loyalty and social hierarchy.
The success of Korean cinema demonstrates how mastery through imitation can lead to genuine innovation. Through careful study of foreign films, Korean filmmakers developed the tools to express their own unique voices and cultural perspectives. The result was the emergence of a distinctive national cinema that speaks both to universal human experiences and to specifically Korean concerns.
Effective Surveying—knowing where to look for successful ideas—requires balancing convention with novelty. And people often get this balance wrong. They focus too much on the novelty piece, creating dishes no one wants to eat or avant-garde films that most audiences can’t (and don’t want to) follow. But as we’ve seen from Mondrian’s grids to Korean cinema, creative breakthroughs often come from deeply understanding and imitating what has worked before.
The beauty of this approach lies in what Austin Kleon calls “our wonderful flaw.” Human beings are incapable of making perfect copies. Our failed attempts to imitate our heroes inevitably reveal our own unique perspective. In those small imperfections and adaptations, we discover our voice. As Kleon puts it, “Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.”
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Excerpted from How Great Ideas Happen by George Newman. Copyright 2026 © by George Newman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC
