Copy your heroes to learn how they did it. Stop copying the day you figure out why they did it.

Copying the surface teaches you the moves: how a shot was framed, how the verse turns, what got left out. That is real learning and it has a natural end point, which arrives when you understand what problem the move was solving. Continuing after that means importing somebody else’s answer to a question you do not have. The why is transferable and the how is theirs.

Take one thing you love and reproduce it as exactly as you can. Then write a sentence about what the maker was trying to achieve with each choice. When you can answer that, stop copying and go solve your own version of the problem.