If you only do what others have already done, you will only feel what others have already felt. However, if you choose to achieve something that no one has ever done, then you will have a satisfaction that no one else has ever had.

If you're just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this? If you merely replicate competitors, there's no point for your existence. Even if you wind up losing, it's better to go down fighting for what you believe in instead of just imitating others.

Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?

Greatness is never achieved by trying to imitate the greatness of another. Greatness is chipping away at all that does not belong to you and then expressing yourself so truly that others can’t help but recognize it.

Let Others Have the Glory

Why must these people go on, and on, copying, copying fragments of old relics from extinct churches, and old tombs as though those were the best that could ever be, and it would be a sacrilege to beat them? Why didn't they want to out-do the best, instead of copying, always copying what had been done?

we ought not to let either our joy at their faults or our grief at their success be idle, but in either case we ought to reflect, how we may become better than them by avoiding their errors, and by imitating their virtues not come short of them.

¿No soy yo como esos mendigos, no grito sin cesar «¡Muerte!» en vez de «¡Alá!», no soy también un santo ciego de la repetición?
Sólo nos asusta la repetición de los otros, en la propia nos acomodamos.

I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?

If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity.. .Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object.. .To be simple is not always as easy as it seems.. .The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.

That thing you did 10 years ago that was significant everyone is doing it now. The thing you did a year ago, you’ve been copied

Start from where the others have finished, those whom where successful and their results were acceptable. Useless repeating of a task is not suggested.

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want - to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff.