Never try to figure things out on your own; all your questions have already been answered somewhere on this planet. You are not the first person to arrive on this Earth, and many things have been done before. There’s no need to start from scratch and explore blindly. Imitation is the fastest way to learn. The reason most people grow slowly is because they fall into a trap called “Perfectionism in Originality.” They always think that referencing others is shameful, and they insist on crashing headlong into failure, trying to invent the wheel on their own. This mindset appears diligent on the surface but is fundamentally extreme arrogance.

In any mature field, all pitfalls have already been cleared by predecessors, and all shortcuts have been mapped out. Your so-called “independent exploration” is often just a low-level repetition of others’ failed paths in the face of probability. Everyone on the internet knows Muhammad Ali’s signature fighting style that dominated the ring, but few realize that he studied his idols’ match footage frame by frame, repeatedly imitating and practicing until he mastered it; even Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg still reviews George Lucas’s drafts; and a master storyteller like Lucas himself would scrutinize Spielberg’s storyboards repeatedly, even directly “recreating” his narrative rhythm. See, even those at the top of the pyramid are copying and validating each other. What makes you think you can win against probability by just hyping yourself up?

As Picasso said, “The mediocre artist borrows; the great artist steals.” Here, “steal” doesn’t mean clumsy copying but peeling back the surface to steal the underlying decision-making model. Investment master Charlie Munger never invents new theories; he simply applies classic models from physics, biology, and sociology to business. He understands that the key to solving complex problems is never in the fog of the future but in the dust of history. Acknowledging the answers of those before you is your only ticket to higher evolution.

If you want exponential growth in life, you must learn to “copy first, then iterate.” First, find someone who has already achieved top results in your target field, treat them as your living map, and stop all ineffective wandering. Second, turn off your unnecessary pride and perform a brutal dissection—don’t just listen to what they say, but analyze how they think, how they make decisions, and how they execute, stripping their logical framework down to its raw core. Finally, after mastering that 1:1 success model, make small adjustments based on your real-world scenario. This process is like welding your own parts onto the shoulders of giants.

Stop wasting time deriving already existing formulas. All greatness begins with humble imitation; all transcendence is built on deep mastery of the wisdom of predecessors. Borrow others’ light to illuminate your own path—that is the only truth for ordinary people to achieve excellence. The real shortcut to growth is to abandon the obsession with “re-inventing the wheel” and directly acquire the underlying logic that predecessors have already optimized.