Almost All Music Is Copying, and That's Actually True

“I’ve come up with a groundbreaking idea!!!”

I often feel like dancing with joy about this in the shower.

But that “groundbreaking idea,” more often than not, never quite lives up to the word “groundbreaking.” Dig into it, and you find something similar already exists, or while you’re still mulling it over, someone else comes out with the same thing.

The right response in that moment isn’t “Damn it, I should have done it sooner!” The right response is “If someone else is thinking along the same lines, maybe it’s actually a good idea.”

Even so, I tend to blurt out the former myself, so this post is really a warning to myself.

I calmly watch how “they” are doing and check their feedback as if it were my own.

How is the market reacting? Has a community formed? Roughly how many people are working on the development, and over what timeframe? How much funding have they managed to raise with that idea? From my perspective, what are the good points and what are the bad points?

Then I analyze. What’s the difference between their idea and mine?

The relationship between an idea and its refinement seems similar to what athletes call “talent” and “effort.”

Talent, in most cases, is something you’re born with, and even when it isn’t innate, it’s fair to assume it was cultivated at a fairly young age. And in most cases, it lies dormant for a while.

Nagatomo of the Japan national team, for example, is known for his incredible stamina, but apparently, all through junior high, he was actually on the low-stamina side. After various twists and turns and years of repeated effort, though, he became a player with stamina unmatched anywhere in the world.

His rise clearly wasn’t due to talent alone, but effort alone doesn’t explain it either. What about the teammates who did the same training as Nagatomo back in junior high? Weren’t there players in high school who trained even harder than he did?

Better to think of it this way: he succeeded in unearthing the talent he already had. And he also succeeded in nurturing it carefully. The two things can’t be separated; they only mean anything together.

Now, back to the topic. Ideas either lie dormant or pop out of nowhere, but on their own, they’re almost 100% useless, I’d say without hesitation. Betting everything on an idea that just popped out is far too reckless.

Take a former delinquent aspiring to be a boxer. No matter how absurdly explosive his punching power is, if he debuts as a pro without any real training, he won’t reach a Japan ranking, let alone a world title.

We talk about ideas “welling up” as if that sounds valuable, but really they’re the kind of thing that just plops down in front of you like a nut falling to the ground, and it’s normal for similar ones to be lying around everywhere. It’s the same situation as a junior youth generation packed with players who look like lumps of pure talent.

Talent itself is certainly amazing, but it’s actually not that special; what follows is a process in which a great many talents fall by the wayside. That’s effort. An idea won’t shine, and won’t hold up, unless it’s refined. So there’s no need to be pessimistic just because a similar idea already exists in the market. In the end, whether an idea turns into something great depends entirely on how it’s refined going forward.

Take Google, take Apple — both are now among the companies dominating the world, but there were other HDD-based music players before the early iPod, and things like the iTunes Store had been tried over and over in the past. As for search engines, Google was a latecomer to an industry already crowded with competitors, and plenty of people still prefer other companies’ products.

So watching their current success, I suspect plenty of people are gritting their teeth and thinking, “Why them and not us…?”

But just as no two talents are exactly alike, no two ideas are exactly alike either. Just as there’s no fixed way to put in effort, there’s no fixed way to refine an idea either. Just as no two players are exactly the same, surely no two outputs are exactly the same either.

There is a difference. That’s why differences arise.

So when you find a similar idea already out there in the market, just think of it as a player with talent similar to yours having turned pro first. Debut timing gets tangled up with all sorts of factors — age, club circumstances, and so on — and looking toward the future, there’s no clear correlation between debuting early and becoming a great player.

There are late-blooming star players, and there are precocious players who fade away. Uehara, the former Giants pitcher, is a good example: he failed the entrance exam once, turned pro after graduating university, and in his late 30s became a player who won MVP in the majors. Morimoto, the former Japan national team soccer player, is the opposite case: he debuted at 15 and drew plenty of attention, moved to Italy at a young age, but never developed further after that, and even now, playing for Chiba in J2, he hasn’t managed standout results there either. Players who draw attention as prodigies and then simply fade away are, honestly, an everyday occurrence.

If you find a rival of a similar type to yourself, becoming exactly the same player as him won’t win you a starting spot, so you need to pin down precisely what separates you from him, then clarify and develop your own strengths. At that point, his play becomes extremely useful as a reference. Sometimes you’ll learn from him, sometimes he’ll serve as a cautionary example. Before you know it, even though you started from the same talent, you should end up as a completely different player from him.

And that’s where the real competition finally begins.

Giving up rashly after comparing yourself to others is a bad human habit. And the comforting line “there’s no point comparing yourself to others” feels very pleasant but is nothing more than a sophistry that misses the point.

You should compare yourself to others, if you’re serious about tackling this.

It’s other people who bring about the recognition of who you are, and it’s far too much of a stretch to think that recognition arises automatically, all on its own.

To begin with, it’s a mistake to view “comparing yourself with others” as something negative. Comparison is a good opportunity for discovery, and it’s genuinely fun and exciting. Sure, sometimes you’ll find nothing but your own flaws and get fed up, but even so, I want to focus on finding the moment where you think, “Oh, I’ve actually got something here.”

I know that’s a difficult thing to do. People don’t want to get hurt, and they hate having a sore spot pointed out.

That’s why I said it: “Do this if you’re serious about tackling it.”

If you’re not really serious, it’s better to stop. Comparing yourself with others in various ways is stressful, and it’s not all pleasant. Indulging in self-love instead, with thoughts like “I’m the best” or “My originality is flawless,” feels, frankly, incredibly good.

So I’ll say it a third time. “If you’re serious about tackling this, do the comparative analysis. If not, stop.”

This is a message aimed at myself.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/12/95/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.