On copying

One realization after burning months on failed projects and scattered ideas is that I wasted far too much time trying to figure everything out by myself.

Every problem I kept slamming into had already been solved dozens of times by someone else. I just refused to look because I convinced myself I needed to discover it my own way. That stubbornness was arrogance dressed up as independence.

I fell into what I now call originality obsession. I treated any form of borrowing as weakness or even shame. I'd rather crash into every wall in the name of pure invention than study how someone who'd already succeeded built a smoother path. It felt noble on the surface. In reality it was slow, expensive, and mostly just low-level repetition of other people's past failures.

The proof was always right in front of me. Ali rewatched his idols' fights frame by frame and drilled their moves until they became his own, while Spielberg and Lucas still trade scripts and storyboards and openly borrow each other's rhythm. The people at the very top of their fields are constantly copying, calibrating, and stealing from one another, and I was pretending I could outrun all of that on sheer originality alone, which is really just bad math dressed up as conviction.

Munger taught this quieter than anyone. He never set out to invent grand new theories. He pulled classic models from physics, biology, psychology and applied them ruthlessly to business, investing, and life. The real shift happened when I stopped romanticizing originality and started copying deliberately. I began seeking out people who had already reached the outcomes I wanted and treated them as living maps. I closed my ego long enough to do a brutal disassembly.

That single change, copy first then iterate, has saved me more time and pain than almost anything else.

All the greatness I admire started with humble imitation. The breakthroughs came later, only after a deep, honest possession of someone else's proven logic.

The most practical reminder I can give myself every morning: stop trying to be the first to everything. Start by becoming a good student of those who already figured it out. The rest tends to follow quietly from there.