4. Creativity is mostly copying.

Few subjects are so misunderstood as creativity. We tend to imbue creative individuals with a near-magical aura, but creativity is much more mundane in practice. Even in fine art, the importance of copying has been neglected. Yes, many revolutions in art were explicit rejections of past trends. But the revolutionaries themselves were, almost without exception, steeped in the tradition they rebelled against. Rebelling against any convention requires awareness of that convention.