Your first style will look like your heroes. Keep making things until it starts looking like your life.

LEADERSHIP

WHAT THIS MEANS

Imitation is the normal first stage of anything creative rather than a failure of originality. You learn by copying people you admire, and for a while everything you make will be visibly downstream of them. What turns that into your own voice is volume and time: eventually your particular experience, taste and limitations start showing through the borrowed moves. Style is a by-product of quantity.

Make more things rather than better ones over the next month. Finish rough work and begin again. Your own voice tends to appear around the twentieth attempt, and it cannot be located by thinking about it.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Whose style still shows through most of what you make?

MORE IN AMBITION, SUCCESS & LEGACY

Free, with nothing to buy inside it.