What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
Original sent as an April 2023 email newsletter.
I stole this email subject line from William Ralph Inge because today I want to explore the murky waters of creativity, business, and moral perfectionism...
And one thing about starting a business that really snuck up on me is the difficulty I have in discerning the lines between theft, inspiration, and industry standards.
Before this, I had only ever worked in the non-profit field. When I was designing presentations as an educator there, I didn’t think twice about recycling activities from colleagues or sourcing videos from witty web personalities who got my points across in a much more entertaining way. I wove them seamlessly into my lectures to keep things interesting and cater to different learning styles.
I credited the original creators, of course. But because my organization didn’t charge for training (my position was 100% grant funded), the materials were an ever-evolving collage.
Now, as someone who DOES charge for her services, I find things like content creation and providing education veryyyyy difficult and confusing.
I’m petrified of unknowingly ripping off someone else’s work.
Part of this is a fear of accidentally breaking copyright law, sure. But it’s much more that I still feel so new to the online business space (and business in general!) that I don't have a good “read” on its unwritten, intangible cultural norms.
To what extent are you allowed to reference and build upon other people’s work within a service that you’re CHARGING other people for?
Does that standard change when we’re posting on social media (even though, ultimately, we’re on social media to funnel people to our paid offers)?
Are you supposed to pay each person you get inspiration from? How much?
Or, are we expected to pretend that every business practice and service we implement is entirely uninfluenced by others?
Integrity is really important to me. I want everything I do in my personal life and in my business to be collaborative and consensual, not extractive and morally gray. I want to infuse trauma-informed practices into the fabric of everything I do.
And, sometimes gripping tightly to these standards of integrity escalates me into a full Clare Devlin-style freakout.
Image description: Two screenshots of Clare (actress Nicola Mary Coughlan) from Derry Girls with the captions: “When I woke up this morning I had a feeling something terrible was going to happen / …and also that essentially, deep down, I’m quite an evil person.”
Hello, moral perfectionism
This term has a long history in the study of philosophy (and I won’t pretend to know even half of what that linked article is talking about), but essentially, it’s what it says on the tin: an obsession with being morally perfect.
According to 16personalities: "It strikes at the core of one’s value and worth as a human. A failure in this area is likely to extend beyond just doing something wrong. It’s about the perfectionist judging their own very being [….] For someone dealing with existential [moral] perfectionism, ‘Am I a good person?’ is the unrelenting question.”
And trying to figure it out in public, as a business owner, can be immobilizing.
Steal Like an Artist
This month, after patiently listening to me talking in circles about these ethical dilemmas, a friend loaned me her copy of a short and beautiful book called “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon.
In it, Kleon cleverly pairs quotes from other artists and thinkers with his own musings to make the point that it is impossible to create something that is 100% original.
Even back in the BC era when Ecclesiastes was written, the author claimed: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
So what hope do we have over two thousand years later while our phones and laptops are feeding us an endless flow of information from all over the world and from every point of recorded history?
Image description: GIF of Carrie Fisher’s character Marie in When Harry Met Sally. The caption is a line she repeats often but takes years to take action on: “You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.”
There is a wee bit of nuance I’d add here.
I am acutely aware of the legacy I, as a white person living on stolen land, have inherited from my ancestors — one of colonization, extraction, appropriation, and theft. On social media especially, I see over and over again how easily we slide into the role of culture vultures. And I know that for these creators, it’s very often not intentional. It's an autopilot setting.
So, I think there is a degree of awareness that folks with privileged social locations need to cultivate about where they’re getting ideas from when they “steal like an artist.” It’s on us to not be a British Museum, or an Elvis, or an Addison Rae. And sourcing constant “inspiration” from cultures that are not your own is murky as hell.
That being said, being a person with an online business means I ultimately HAVE to figure out the middle ground between moral perfectionism and extractive creativity. Because as Salvador Dalí says, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
So here are some ways I’m leaning into the lessons of “Steal Like An Artist"
Squirreling away images, quotes, business offers, and other forms of art more often. Kleon advises artists to create a robust "swipe file" — a place to store the work of others that we're inspired by or resonate with. When it comes time to create, this "swipe file" makes it easy to refer back and reconnect. So this month, I slowly added to a photo album on my phone called “April Squirrelings." Here are a few of the more interesting images and videos I've collected.
Creating a colorful habit tracker so I can infuse creative practices into my daily schedule. As the author asserts, “Amassing a body of work or building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time.” So, this month, I got to color in a little box if I managed to write for 30 minutes on that given day.
Making a list of people whose work I admire, and imagining how I might become a collage of their philosophies and styles. Not only is it necessary to study the people who actually know what they're doing, but "seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff” (Kleon, 17).
Image description: Photo of a page from “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon. Over a black background, the page features a white T-chart titled, “Good theft vs. Bad theft.” From the top row, each side of the T-chart reads: “Honor” / “Degrade” ; “Study” / “Skim” ; “Steal from many” / “Steal from one” ; “Credit” / “Plagiarize” ; “Transform” / “Imitate” ; “Remix” / “Rip off”
