Steve Jobs once said that… Pablo Picasso once said that… “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

This sounds pithy and all but it’s hard to pin down when or where Picasso said this, if he ever even did.

A similar quote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” can be attributed to British poet T.S. Eliot in a 1920 essay collection.

Even earlier than that, W. H. Davenport Adams proposed that “to imitate” was commendable, but “to steal” was unworthy—using the word “steal” in a negative rather than positive light—in a 1892 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine titled “Imitators and Plagiarists.”

Apparently the line between copying and stealing is blurry, even within the history of the phrase itself.

So what do all of these successful creatives actually mean when they use this phrase? What is the difference between copying and stealing? And must we resort to creative theft in order to do great work? 

Let’s get to the bottom of this…

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and 40 principles relied on by the world’s greatest creatives. 

Imitation is food for the soil

In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene examines the lives of individuals who made it to the pinnacle of their fields—figures like Charles Darwin, Henry Ford, and Yoky Matsuoka—and reveals the commonalities between their paths to greatness. 

For one thing, Greene noticed that the greats all start out as copycats.

Take Wolfgang Mozart for instance.

As Greene writes, “it is generally agreed among classical music critics that he did not write an original and substantial piece of music until well after ten years of composing.”

In fact, it wasn’t until Mozart was in his mid twenties, over two decades since he first learned to play the piano at the age of four, that his frustration with his own unoriginality hit a tipping point:

“For as long as he could remember, his head was continuously filled with music,” Greene writes, “but it was always the music of other people. He knew that his own pieces were simply clever imitations and adaptations of other composers. He had been like a young plant, passively absorbing nutrients from the environment in the form of the different styles he had learned and mastered.”

After realizing this, Mozart was finally ready to break free of imitation, and fortunately, as Greene puts it, “the soil was now rich enough.” This copycat was ready to use his stolen goods in order to produce something brand new…

“The apprenticeship of the past twenty years had prepared him well for this moment. He had developed a prodigious memory—in his mind he could hold together all of the harmonies and melodies that he had absorbed over the years. Instead of notes or chords, he could think in terms of blocks of music and write them out as quickly as he heard them in his head. His speed of composing would now astonish those who witnessed it.” “More important, the years he had spent learning how to compose in every conceivable genre now allowed him to use these genres to express something new, to stretch their boundaries and even permanently transform them through his creative powers.” “He gave his compositions the power to express dread, sadness, foreboding, anger, exhilaration, and ecstasy. Audiences were spellbound by this new sweeping sound that suddenly had so many new dimensions. After these innovations, it became almost impossible for composers to return to the light, frothy court music that had previously prevailed. European music had forever been altered.”

The original music that poured out of Mozart over the next ten years (until his untimely death at 35) would solidify him as one of history’s greatest composers. 

The takeaway, Greene concludes, is that “the knowledge that prepares the ground for creative activity largely comes from a rigorous apprenticeship in which we have mastered all of the basics. Once the mind is freed from having to learn these basics, it can focus on higher, more creative matters.”

It is hard to produce original work without first mastering the basic skills required to do so. It just so happens that imitating the work of others is an excellent way to learn these foundational skills that can someday fuel originality.

Presumably this is one of the principles that the phrase, “good artists copy, great artists steal,” is speaking to.

It hints at the transition that we undergo when we move from simply soaking up the work of others to remixing everything we’ve internalized in new ways. The ingredients that we “stole” from others are the same but we are finally able to create never-before-seen dishes with them.

Do not be afraid to use imitation as a learning strategy. 

Once you can do what others can, you will be able to do things that no others have done.

But it’s not just skills that great artists steal from others, it’s also ideas…

Great artists steal with a deep appreciation of context 

In 2017, language learning app Duolingo was in trouble.

It was the number #1 most downloaded education app in the world with hundreds of millions of users—but its growth was trending towards a flatline.

To turn things around, the company brought in growth guru, Jorge Mazal, who had a track record of success working with MyFitnessPal and the games company Zynga.

Most people see growth as a function of attracting new users, except Duolingo actually had no problem with this. Mazal understood that the real issue was users weren’t sticking around for long enough. Duolingo wasn’t growing because the app was losing too many of its existing customers. 

And so Mazal’s mission was simple: increase retention.

With his background in gaming apps, Mazal knew that “top digital games at the time had much higher retention rates than our product,” as he explains it. In other words, when it came to keeping users around, gaming apps were the pros. 

So Mazal believed that all the growth team had to do was study gamified features used in top games and then incorporate them into Duolingo.

Great artists steal, after all.

“Our team at the time was hooked on a game called Gardenscapes,” Mazal remembers, “a mobile, match-3 puzzle game similar to Candy Crush. This mobile game became our first inspiration.”

Mazal saw that Gardenscapes used a “moves counter” that “allowed users only a finite number of moves to complete a level.” The moves counter “added a sense of scarcity and urgency to the gameplay,” and so Mazal explains that he “decided to incorporate the counter mechanic into [the] product. We gave our users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly before they had to start the lesson over.”

Mazal says that “It took our team a couple of months of work to add the counter” but he was confident that all this work would pay off because he was copying a playbook that had a proven track record. 

Then came the launch…

“Depressingly, the result of all that effort was completely neutral. No change to our retention. No increase in DAU. We hardly got any user feedback at all. I was deflated.”

The difference between copying and stealing is blurry, but it seems that Mazal had chosen to do whichever the bad one is.

Not entirely undeterred, Duolingo next tried to copy Uber’s referral program.

This approach did not fall completely flat—new users increased by 3%—but Mazal laments “it was not the type of breakthrough we needed.”

This forced Mazal into a period of deep reflection on what had gone wrong with Duolingo’s attempts to take inspiration from other apps. That’s when the problem with Gardenscape’s moves counter and Uber’s referral program hit him. Mazal’s realization was one that extends well beyond the world of app building…

“In both of these situations,” Mazal realized, “we had borrowed successful features from other products, but the wrong way. We had failed to account for how a change in context can impact the success of a feature. I came away from these attempts realizing that I needed a better understanding of how to borrow ideas from other products intelligently.”

This reveals one of the biggest differences between a good artist and a great artist when it comes to stealing. 

Great artists steal with a deep appreciation for context.

What does that mean exactly? And how can we improve our ability to steal in a contextually intelligent way? 

Well, Mazal now has some questions that he relies on to achieve this: 

• Why is this feature working in that product?

• Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?

• What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?

Naturally, you can just swap out the word “feature” for and “product” for anything.

“Why is this marketing strategy working for that brand?”

Or… 

“Why might this plot line succeed or fail in our context?”

Or…

“What adaptations are necessary to make this economic strategy succeed in our country?”

In the same way that you need to suppress the body’s immune system for an organ to be accepted, you need to ask these questions in order to ensure a new idea can flourish in your context rather than just falling flat on its face. 

Armed with this breakthrough, Mazal’s team took another stab at incorporating gamification into Duolingo—this time attempting to roll out a leaderboard system.

Inspiration for Duolingo’s leaderboard would come from FarmVille 2, only this time, context would be considered. 

When it came to FarmVille's leaderboard, it didn't just show your friends' scores—they also displayed the scores of other active players you didn't even know. 

This stranger-led approach made sense in FarmVille because your friends might not play often, so matching you with active, unknown players kept the competition lively.

But would this approach make sense for Duolingo? 

Yes, because many Duolingo users study on their own, and comparing themselves only to friends isn’t very motivating if those friends aren’t active. The context was similar in this regard. 

But FarmVille also used a league system which users could advance through by completing extra tasks, which provided clear milestones and extra rewards.

Would this approach make sense for Duolingo?

Not quite. Mazal’s team realized that adding extra tasks for leaderboard progression would complicate the learning experience. 

Instead, they simplified the league system: users moved up based on consistent engagement in their regular lessons because that’s the behavior that the app was trying to encourage.

Duolingo borrowed the idea of leaderboards and leagues from other apps but did so in a way that made sense for its own use case.

Mazal’s contextually-intelligent feature incorporation was a smash success.

The leaderboard led to a 17% increase in overall learning time and “the number of highly engaged learners (users who spend at least 1 hour a day for 5 days a week) tripled.”

Ultimately the initiatives rolled out over the next few years using this context-sensitive approach would contribute to a 4.5x increase in daily active Duolingo users.

The key takeaway here is that when you borrow an idea or strategy from elsewhere, you must first deeply understand why it works or worked in its original context and then thoughtfully adapt it to fit your own unique circumstances.

The most successful adaptations occur when you ask:

• Why is this idea effective in its original environment?  

• How might things differ in my context?  

• What tweaks or modifications are needed to achieve similar success?

Great artists don’t steal ideas, they recontextualize them. 

The magic lies in turning the brilliance you borrow into your signature style.

But before you head out to pull off your next creative smash and grab, here’s one more principle for stealing like the best of them…

Heroes are blueprints, not templates

You know how they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes?

Well, maybe you shouldn’t copy them either, at least not entirely. 

On a recent episode of Ryan Holiday’s podcast, NYT bestselling author Austin Kleon was reflecting on how he regrets taking a different path from his writing heroes: 

“I regret not getting a journalism background or not writing for like a paper or anything, just because so many of my favorite writers had that background.”

Then Kleon catches himself mid train of thought, “but I will say that… that's what all the blogging was about, you know? And I feel really lucky that in the early days, I mean, I was just old enough that blogs were just like a really big deal when I got out of college.”

This realization—that a traditional journalism training made sense for Kleon’s heroes but that blogging may have made much more sense for him—is part of a deeper realization. 

As Kleon continues, “as I've kind of gotten a little bit older, I've understood the context that I grew up in, and that I came up in—and I just started to see, oh… you were just kind of taking advantage of what was available to you.”

The specific path that Kleon’s heroes took may not have made sense for Kleon, just as it might not make sense for a writer starting out fresh today to copy Kleon’s path. 

This has changed the advice he gives out, “when I talk to younger people now, I'm like, I don't know—what's big?” “Well, I'm in a context in which TikTok is a big thing. OK, I'm going to get on TikTok. Or you could do the opposite. You could say, I'm going to do interviews with people with a typewriter and mail them the question. But it's understanding that the people you looked up to were existing in a very specific context.”

“I think for me,” Kleon concludes, “it's just about looking around and being like, ‘what can I use?’ Just being really open to thinking deeply about your context.” “And it's up to you to really use your context to your advantage.”

This doesn’t mean we can’t take inspiration from our heroes, we just have to be smart about what aspects of their approach we take inspiration from.

Rather than a young writer mindlessly starting a blog because that’s what Ryan Holiday and Austin Kleon did, that writer may be better served by looking one layer deeper at what they did: 

• They both had mentors that helped them hone their craft. 

• They both took advantage of the hot medium of their day, blogging. 

• They both introduced new twists into the nonfiction space, where Holiday picked an underserved niche to write about and modernize: Stoicism, and Kleon blended art with writing to produce a style of book that felt fresh.

Many tactics have a short shelf life but certain underlying principles can apply forever.

When studying heroes, differentiate between the timebound strategies they used—the things that made sense only for the context in which they existed, and the timeless—the things that transcend time and could be deployed or modified in today’s context.

For every successful person, movement, or business you study, you will notice that they made decisions based on the best information, trends, and technology available to them at the time. 

But fast forward to today and there are almost certainly new and better ways to make those same decisions. Technology has advanced. Culture has shifted. Conventions have been broken. Therein lies your opportunity to disrupt what has come before. Therein lies your opportunity to reinvent what succeeded in the past. Therein lies your opportunity to reinvent yourself and avoid becoming stale. Periodically revisit old decisions you made long ago and think through them again with fresh eyes.

Remember that you always have a unique opportunity on your side: you live in a context that has never existed prior to now. 

You can use this to your advantage.

Take inspiration from timeless principles but revitalize them for the modern moment.

This is why heroes provide the blueprint—but not the final design.

Tying it all together

So… what is the difference between how a good artist steals versus how a great artist steals?

1. Great artists use imitation to enrich their soil and lay the ground for future originality

2. Great artists borrow brilliant ideas from other places but adapt them thoughtfully to their own context

3. Great artists absorb principles from heroes and history but deploy them with modern tactics and fresh takes

And as for bad artists?

They’re the ones who don’t steal at all.

But that’s a controversial topic we’ll save for another time.

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