A Case For Copying

Why?

Because people feel they are above that, but they really shouldn't. Take the latest Apple event. Apple is a great company; They make fantastic products, are very profitable and worth a ridiculous bunch of money. Samsung? Apple is worth more than four Samsungs. Google? Microsoft? Apple's worth more than the two combined. Intel? You'd have to triple Intel's net worth to come close to Apple. So it's safe to say they're ahead of the competition. After their latest event however (their announcement of the iPad pro, iPhone 6s, 6s Plus), everybody was focusing on how most of the new features they announced were already present in other competitors' devices. Not to mention how they always seemed to be doing just that; hang back, implement an already existing feature and boom, success! Now that just makes people mad. But I'm here to remind you why they're successful anyway, and what you should take from them.

So what are you saying?

Apple's strategy is a brilliant one, and you should copy them if you can. There is nothing new under the sun people, and I guarantee majority of the strategies you come up with yourselves, have been attempted successfully, at one point or another in history. So if you're thinking that you'll get by without following in someone's footsteps, I've got news for you: you can't. We have no accurate number ascribed to how many people have ever lived, but estimates have it at around 100 billion. Yeah, so out of all these people what are the chances that you've come up with an original idea? Even my blog. I've found several instances of people going through IMDb's Top 250 list.  

Now you may think it's still worth the effort to always be original, but it truly isn't. Let's use my blog again, as an example. You are probably thinking : "Man, The Tony Tay is like the best blog ever! Tonyeli's such a great writer; He's smart, hilarious, and just several levels of cool. How did he get so good?" I'll tell you how I got so good - I get like one view every two weeks, so I'm pretty damn good.  I got here by obsessively reading other people's blogs. That simple. In fact the best piece of writing advice I've ever read is to replicate a good author's work, word-for-word; Or, copy the hell out of a good book. True story.

Notice it said to copy a good book and not just any book; that's important too. This time we'll use Dell as an example. A few years ago Apple released their MacBook air, and after later iterations, it became the prime choice for best laptop; it had the right balance of portability, power, and comfort. Since then, everyone's been unashamedly chasing after the air, failing laughably at it. Until... last January, when Dell released their new XPS 13; finally, someone had caught up. So why the XPS 13? Instead of going after just the looks and portability, Dell went after battery life, screen and comfort too. Just go ahead and read every review of Dell's XPS 13; they'll invariably praise the screen, battery life, keyboard and trackpad in addition to the looks. Then read those of the latest MacBook Air, and you'll see the pattern.

There's a case to made for copying yourself too, or in other words, doing more of what already works. I know that sometimes change is great, and you need a little variety, but don't change just for change's sake. I'm linking a great article by James clear which explains why, far better than I could ever do myself. Here's the link. He uses this great example where doctors were able to save about 1,500 lives in a year, by introducing a checklist which made sure doctors washed their hands before surgery. Yep, a checklist that made sure they washed their hands. You really should check out the article.

Okay, Okay...what next?

Don't be afraid to copy stuff. People have already figured out better ways to do certain things, so there's no need to have to do it all again. This isn't a movie either, where you don't want use some other guy's strategy because you're the good guy, so you gotta do things in a unique way. There's no time for that. In fact, I'm gonna leave another link, this time a short story written by seminal author Arthur C. Clarke (2001, A  Space Odyssey). In the story, an advanced space-faring civilization lost a war by doing something different. Know what it was? They started using superior technology. Link's here. So try something you already knew, or copy someone else and see how it turns out, but don't feel weird about it. I trust I'll see you guys copying away. I'm particularly waiting for someone to start copying my blog - man it'll be the proudest moment of my life,right before the worst, which is when I realize that the person's blog will start beating mine.