Copycat to Success

This is a write-up which I will use for my Toastmaster project speech #10 - Inspire Your Audience. Yes, it should be a motivational speech - however,  I would try to deliver it differently by explaining people on How we can succeed through Copying.

Copycat To Success

We Live in a World of Copycats.

As part of human being, we are naturally the creature of copycat. We copy from the Cradle to the Grave! Copycatting starts the day we were born. We copy the language we speak, the food we eat, the hairstyle, the way we walk and the way we dress. When we were in primary school, we were taught to copy alphabets. When we get older, we copy how others drive a car. When in Rome, we Do as the Romans Do.

James Baldwin once said "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders. But they have never failed to imitate them."


If copycat is part of our nature, then,


Why we are not good at Copying? 
It is our education system, they don't call it copying - they called it Plagiarism. It is consider a form of cheating and those who are caught will be punished. During examinations we are not allowed to use notes, to refer to friends and to have any form of reference.
But do you think in current ICT era, this still applied? Later on when we have a job, we still refer to the website, to our friends and books.
Because of this plagiarism concept, most of us think that copycat is wrong and originality is the best thing to do! So we try to create something by our own starting from scratch. I was once a student - as most of you were. In one particular assignment I tried to do it by my own. But the result, my friends who are copying 100% gets higher marks than me. The next time I did my assignment, I tried to find some 'source' first, from there I improvise whatever answer script to the assignment, and amazingly my marks always get higher compared to the 'source' that I refer to. Isn't copycatting works?

Innovation Start From Copying

Every innovation starts from an idea then combined with another idea. Everybody here knows that China is the greatest copycat in the world. They copy almost everything in this world aren't they? There is one chinese lady in Shanghai, who work with IDEO the leading creativity consultant in the world. She said "You westerners, you obses with innovation. Innovation means that you come out with something new. You consumed by copyright. She said it is not about copyright. You know copyright here, copyright there. It is not. It is about COPYING IT RIGHT! and this is absolutely brilliant.

One day a guy name Fredrik Haren was in a conference in China called INNOVATIVE CHINA. There was head of Motorola in China, head of Nokia in China, head of Ericsson in China and he's sitting next. And the moderator asked "So how can China become an Innovative Country?"
Then the guy from Ericsson said "If China wants to become innovative, you need to stop copying!" Then the guy from Nokia said "If you want to become innovative, you need to stop copying!" Then the guy from Motorola said "If you want to become innovative, you need to stop copying!" And then Fredrik look at them and asked "Excuse me, for the three guys who are talking about doing things different, you guys sound very much the same." And then he looked at them back and asked "Excuse me, which one of you who invented the mobile phone?? Bacause the other two must have copy it!" Who invented the mobile phone??? Motorola... Motorola invented the first mobile phone. And Ericsson  made the first mobile phone system. Because without the system, mobile phone is pretty much useless, isn't it? And Nokia made it a global product so that everybody could afford. So, who invented the mobile phone? All of them... It is almost impossible to invent anything without copying!

The greatest creative human that ever live, perhaps, is Pablo Picasso. Famous for being different right. What does he said? "Good artist copy. Great artist steal!"

It is not about copying blindly, but we need to take the best of the things that we see and combined it and create something new and make it better!


J. Paul Getty said in a quote "If you want to get rich, just find someone making lots of money and do what he's doing!" 


One of the great business in the world is McDonalds! McDonalds have been very successful business not because of they make a better burger than anybody else. But they invent a great system, and they allow people to copy it. And they called it "Franchise!"

One of the owner of McDonalds, Max Cooper who own 45 McDonalds franchises said:
"I've always felt that I don't have to be an originator - just a good duplicator"

Even in corporate business, the successful companies copied one another.
Look at the product. Doesn't they copied from the competitor?

And the question is not about who copied who. The question always come out is which one is better?

And a company who copied a successful companies, chances are, they are going to succeed. Just look at this two companies. Aren't the logo as much or less the same. With white font moving up and red colour as the background. 

Even the website also look pretty much similar.

  

And if you are familiar with this guy, he is quite famous with his appearance in TV and Billboard. He creates a huge success in his motivation seminar. Do you think he invent himself? No, in one of the seminar "Marketing & U" he mentioned that the success of his company is actually because of he duplicate another company based in Canada, the Peak Potentials created by T. Harv Eker, the author of The Secrets of Millionaire Mind. Look at the image below! How he positioned the finger pointing to the mind!

So, as a conclusion, aren't you think that copying is great. Burke Hedge said in his book - "If there's one thing, every single person in this world is good at - it's copycatting!" You all are actually good at it. The only thing you need to learn is to copy the right thing and the right way! So let us copycat ourselves to success!