Don't You Consider Copying As An Art?

Plagiarism is a crime and we learn this fact from early stage of student life. But we are not taught how to be creative and come up with unique ideas. As a result we end up with plagiarizing in essay, assignment, reports, presentation, thesis paper, research article etc.

We all want to be creative and do extraordinary things. So naturally question comes how we can inculcate creativity in ourselves? Don't be shocked if I say the answer is learning to copy effectively. Explaining this statement.

At first we need to have clear concept about originality. We generally think that original is something which is totally unique and no one has done this before. But is this really possible?

Austin Klein in his New York Times best-selling book "Steal Like An Artist" explained different ways to be creative. He says, "What is originality? Undetected plagiarism."

"What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original." -Austin Klein

Everything we learn from birth to death, we learn from others. Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them." It's true for scientist, writers, poets, singers, sculptures and other professionals also.

Now the difference between an artist and a common man is between the ability to collect and use information or knowledge from various sources in effective way.

Austin Klein says, "The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love."

"Plagiarizing is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. So, don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style."

We usually copy and paste information on a particular topic directly from some widely available source without any major modification. It does not add any extra value in our work. We need to collect information from wide number of people or sources and understand the concept properly to derive modification.

"If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you're so original."

Finally question arise how to be good at copying? Author suggests to increase the boundary of knowledge by reading more books and following the great people, who are master of specific fields.

Our job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas we collect, the more new perspective we can get. Later we can create a new thing by adjusting many perspectives. This is how creative people of all fields works. Copying is an art. Genius people are master of copying. That's why their works look unique and original.

So what are you waiting for? Keep copying for becoming a master of it.

READ MORE, OBSERVE MORE, COLLECT MORE, COPY MORE !!!