Many people try to imitate the masters they admire, but this is a mistake.

As the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd said, “If you imitate a person you admire, the best you can possibly hope for is to become a bad imitation of the person you admire. What you need to do instead is to locate the same level of inventiveness as the person you admire, and apply it to a new domain.”

If you need to copy, copy precisely what you need, do something new with it, make it your own, and move on.

Imitation gets you stuck in someone else’s mud.