"All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players,
they have their exits and entrances and one man in his time plays many parts."
Another way to say this? Fake it till you make it.
There's this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people
and it's called impostor syndrome.
Now, the clinical definition of impostor syndrome is it's a psychological phenomenon
in which people are unable to internalise their accomplishments.
But what it really means is it means you feel like a phoney.
Like you're just winging it. That you really have no idea what you're doing.
Well, guess what? Nobody does. Ask anyone doing truly creative work
and they'll tell you the truth, they don't necessarily know
where the good stuff comes from, they just show up and do their thing every day.
There's this word called dramaturgy and it's actually a fancy term for something
William Shakespeare spelt out in this play "As You Like It" about 400 years ago.
"All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players,
they have their exits and entrances and one man in his time plays many parts."
Another way to say this? Fake it till you make it. I actually love this phrase, there are two ways to
read the phrase "fake it till you make it." One, pretend to be something
you're not until you are, fake it until you're successful,
until everybody sees you the way you want them to. Or, number two, pretend to be making something
until you actually make something. I actually love both readings,
you have to start dressing for the job you want not the job you have
and you have to start doing the work that you really want to be doing.
I also love this book by Patti Smith called "Just Kids."
It's a story about how two friends who wanted to be artists moved
to New York City and became artists. And you know how they learned to be artists?
They pretended to be artists. In my favourite scene from the book,
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe,
they go down to Washington Square Park in New York and they're dressed in their gipsy gear.
And everybody's hanging out and this old tourist couple comes by and starts gawking at them.
And the woman, she taps her husband on the arm and she says,
"Robert take their picture, I think they're artists."
And the husband says, "ah, get out of here, they're just kids."
That's where the book gets its title. The point is that all the world is a stage.
Creative work is actually a kind of theatre, the stage is your studio,
your desk or your workstation. The costume is your outfit.
Your painting pants, your business suit, or that funny hat that helps you think.
Your props are your tools and your material. Your laptop.
The script is just plain old time, an hour here, an hour there,
just time measured out for things to happen. That's what the script is.
And the best way I know of going about faking it until you make it is to start copying.
Now, nobody is born with a style or a voice, we don't come out of the womb knowing who we are,
in the beginning we learn by pretending to be our heroes.
We learn by copying. Now, we're talking
about practice here, not plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking someone else's work
and trying to pass it off as your own. Copying is about reverse engineering.
It's like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.
We learn to write by copying the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practising scales.
Painters learn to paint by copying the masters. Now, copying.
First, you have to figure out who to copy. And second, you have to figure out what to copy.
Now, who to copy is actually very easy, you copy your heroes,
the people you love, the people you're inspired by, the people you wanna be.
The songwriter Nick Lowe, he says, "you start out by rewriting your hero's catalogue."
Now, and the other important thing about who to copy from,
you don't just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them.
The playwright Wilson Mizner, he said, "if you copy from one author, it's plagiarism,
if you copy from many, it's research." And the cartoonist Gary Panter
said something very similar, he says, "if you have one person you're influenced by,
everyone will say you're the next whoever, but if you ripoff 100 people,
everyone will say you're so original." What to copy is a little bit trickier.
You don't just wanna steal someone's style, you wanna steal the thinking behind the style.
You don't just wanna steal the code, you wanna steal the thinking behind the code.
And you don't wanna look like your heroes, you actually wanna see like your heroes.
The reason to copy your heroes in their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse inside
their minds. That's what you really want.
To internalise their way of looking at the world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work
without understanding where they were coming from, your work will never be any more than a knockoff.
T.S. Eliot said it best, he said, "poets steal." He said, "bad poets deface what they take
and good poets make it into something better or at least something different."
And I'm actually gonna end off with a quote from Francis Ford Coppola.
He said, "we want you to take from us, we want you at first to steal from us
because you can't steal." "You will take what we give you
and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice.
“And that's how you begin and one day someone will steal from you."