Self-Discovery Through Grand Theft

Find your own originality through active inspiration from others—in the form of stealing.

Some Housekeeping

Hi all! Thanks for reading Badwater. I’m going through some weekly changes so I can be more consistent with posting on Tuesday and Thursdays. What I’m planning on doing is posting a written post on Tuesdays and a video post on Thursdays that speaks more on the weekly topic. Sometimes, a different format helps bring out a different side of my thinking about the subject.

So thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoy this post!

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Imagine that you want to be rich, so you see what rich people look like. You Google “rich people”, and you find where they go every day, what they wear, what they eat, so on.

You think to yourself, “If I go where they go, wear what they wear, eat what they eat, then I must become rich sooner or later.”

Now imagine that you love an artist, and they’ve become a role model for you. They’re a writer and a blogger. You also want to become a writer and a blogger.

So the easiest way for you to become a writer on par with your favorite is to write what they write, blog what they blog.

This feels good for a while, because you have so much to write about, following in the footsteps of your role model. But each time you try to think of something new, you get stuck, and fall back in the writings of the role model.

And when you’ve caught up with the artist’s output, you’re suddenly lost, and just waiting for new crumbs for you to emulate.

And for that rich person whose behaviors you adopted: You are surprisingly poorer than you were before—who knew that living like the visibly rich was so expensive!

One last example: Imagine you’ve found a spiritual mentor on the internet or in some books, and you love everything they speak about, write about, and think about. You study all their books, their teachings, anything the’ve made.

Once everything has been consumed, you think that you should be on the same level as your mentor, yet there’s something missing.

When someone asks you a question about these teachings, you’re at first very confident about what you’re regurgitating.

But then this person asks you why you believe what you believe— you start and stop and stammer, because while you know the teachings to the word, you don’t yet know the foundations of the teachings themselves. You know the speakings of your mentor, but not why they spoke, why they wrote what they wrote.

We are naturally quick to know the what and the how of things. Like games we play as kids, we pick up what the game is about and how to win it.

The question of “why” we play these games, or do anything in particular is usually the last thing on our mind, because it doesn’t have the immediate personal benefit of the whats and hows.

This creates a gap between knowledge and wisdom, and in this gap is spacious room for disconnectedness, manipulation, over-attachment, and so many other symptoms. This is because you are adhering to and providing faith in a system of living—rich, writerly, spiritually, etc.—where your reality must fit the system rather than the system fit reality itself.

You’ve mastered the workings of a beautiful piece of machinery, but its inputs are vague and mysterious, and you rely on the outputs being consistent as well. Inconsistent results are typically blamed on the user, not the machine itself.

This mode of thought can squash your awareness of edge cases, existential questions, and any counterexamples you may run into—and if they should ever sneak by your defenses, the whole machine can break down without any clue about how to rebuild it by yourself.

I recently shared a post by Rachel Z about the people follow Richard Rudd, the founder of a spiritual system of self-discovery called the Gene Keys:

But if you’re in a state of hopelessness and disempowerment, expecting to rely solely on the [Gene Keys] is probably not going to help you change your station in life the way you expect or want it to. From an energetic perspective, the reason Richard himself has such good energy and aura is because he is a well-refined product. And by well-refined, I mean that he hasn’t only done contemplation or GK in his own life!

He has studied, practiced, and lived every spiritual concept, technique, and lifestyle that he could possibly get his hands on! So, it can be a bit misleading to believe that by contemplating GK and mostly just by doing that, we can attain the level of refinement Richard has reached.

Faith Versus Commitment

It’s easier to think that someone else figured out the system for self-discovery, and to adopt it with full faith. But I believe there’s a difference between faith and commitment.

If you commit to a system, it means you’ll spend the time to fully understand it and make it work to your benefit. You know its ins and outs, and you especially know its capabilities and limitations. You’ll also recognize when to move on when the system is out of date, or doesn’t particularly speak to your own life objectives right now.

Even Richard Rudd had thoughts about moving beyond the structure:

The structure is there to launch us beyond the structure, and that’s the whole purpose of it. Our thinking gets us stuck, - the way we think about our partner, our enemy, our bank account, our government, our future. It all catches us in the net; we get caught by our minds. (Rudd, The 64 Ways)

We commit to many things, even if they have dead ends, like a job we don’t like, because at times we find our integrity in our commitment to other things and others, even when it’s just obligation.

If we have a healthy relationship with others and our work, we’ll cut those commitments and channel our energy to something more productive, but we can at least feel grateful that we are committed, persevering people even when we don’t like it—in other words, disciplined.

But you know that many people don’t have commitment for anything in their lives, so they shy away from learning about systems that affect them everyday, like governance, economics, and social castes, and just take it for granted as part of their daily lives. Passively, they’ll find some benefits, but never take full advantage of the systems they live in. And they certainly won’t feel like they’re in the driver’s seat of their own life.

On the other hand you have faith, a commitment so strong that even when a system doesn’t work for you, you’ll more likely blame yourself for not knowing enough about this system, or not being worthy enough of it, and even double down on trying to make it work for your life.

Faith doesn’t require understanding, but loyalty. It’s like being a self-described expert of the ocean after only studying its waves and reflections. You’ll have plenty to say about the crashing waves and the light refractions, but will defend against those who ask about the cause of these surface movements.

“Systematizing”

When I think about this topic, I always go back to a thought from Nietzsche:

“I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” (The Portable Nietzsche)

With Nietzsche’s perspective, I believe that our integrity is lacking when we’re okay with smashing all of reality into a singular structure of thought; this is the framework of egoism, who believes that the complexity of nature can be fit into a neatly-organized box.

And isn’t it disappointing that despite all the boxes we’ve put reality in over the past two thousand years, that we deal with the same problems, just in a more digital form in the past 40 years?

Faith just tells us that not enough people have awakened to the effortless truth, yet a lot of effortful systems like capitalism and democracy have spread like global wildfires. We are told people are lazy, but they’ve only been working longer and harder with each passing year for increasingly complex systems.

We copy, copy, copy from our ancestors, and we’re starting to discover what we’ve lost by such superficial emulation.

If we are going to take a more active role in what lifestyles, practices, and thought structures we keep for ourselves as individuals and cultures, we’re going to need to start stealing instead of copying.

Why steal?

I’ve already gone through the issues of copying: We take useless, superficial aspects of other people’s thoughts and lives and emulate them, thinking that we can embody their energy through observable behaviors—the advice they write down in books and articles, the things they do on social media, the things they speak about on podcasts and interviews.

But take the rich person. People love watching what they do in the media, and love to later emulate these behaviors with typically negative financial results.

But what if you took the one thing that makes rich people so fun to watch anyway? What if you took their money? And then you did their usual behaviors, including their investments and wealth management? You would certainly be embodying them much more accurately.

When you copy, you take everything equally, without prioritization. When you steal, you take one thing and leave the rest, because you don’t have the time to sift through useless things in such a scandalous act. You are actively prioritizing what needs to be kept, and what needs to be left.

Back to the artistic side, which is much more abstract than financial gain—when you steal, you are actually expressing your highest values. No, not moral ones, but aesthetic values. By deciding not to copy your role model, but stealing from them, you are in the act of figuring out what you want to take and what you want to leave.

For the writer mentioned before—maybe you keep the sci-fi parables, but you leave the run-on sentences. Maybe you keep the blog posts about conspiracy theories you’re interested in, but you leave the Funko Pop reviews. Suddenly you are arriving at your own creative identity.

What’s even better though is that now that you’re a thief, running from the law, you might as well steal from others as well. You scour your local area for other writers, and in a flash you stole this writer’s penchant for non-linear storytelling, but dropped the vague characterizations.

And then you stole another writer’s love of using a Foreword to tie into the motivations of the antagonist, but drop the constant protagonist-gets-captured storylines. Your creative identity grows even more.

My partner recently purchased a horror-romance novel from a local author. While it’s always a bit exciting to see a local artist share their work, it was disappointing to see that publisher interventions likely turned a relatively unoriginal piece of work into an exact copy of Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray.

Where the author tried to steal from her inspirations—she is still new to the industry and still figuring out her creative identity with Book One—she was still forced into copying commercial successes, and lost a lot of her identity by using comparative works.

Most people in life copy, some steal, and the very few create from nothingness. In other words, most will work in systems created by others, others will adapt these systems for themselves, and a tiny amount will create fully new, untested systems for others to discover and navigate for themselves. And that last one is not a skill for everyone, including me.

Identify If You’re Copying or Stealing

Are you wondering why you might be working so hard trying to start your own business? Like no matter how hard you try, there’s just no interest in what you’re providing others?

Are relationships fleeting and unfulfilling? Do you think they are going so well and suddenly they just end out of the blue?

Are you living what appears to be the good, successful life, but there’s still a hole in your stomach, as if some great mystery ingredient is missing?

Do you travel around the world, but you feel even more lost to yourself?

In all of these situations, you might be copying the behaviors of other people’s ways of doing business, relationships, travel, and living, useless bits and all. You’re trying to keep alive something that worked for others but don’t work at all for yourself.

To drop all that copy-paste baggage, you’re gonna need to start stealing instead.

First, figure out what values actually drive you. Are you on this planet for your freedom? Happiness? Love? Connection? Solitude? These are your Core Values, and you really don’t have to stray away from them unless you’re in financial strain or a work-release program.

Then you’re going to perform an audit on your lifestyle, Mari Kondo-style. “Does this activity truly drive me to my Core Values in life? If yes, keep trucking, but always keep auditing because you will change, and your values will change, or the activities that lead you to those values will change.

And if they don’t serve you, find ways to substitute with activities that actually do drive you to what you want.

In fact, start stealing activities from others that look like they’ll take you in the right direction. Steal it right from under them, but leave that guys’ obsession for Funko Pops. Maybe the 82nd party hostel isn’t the vibe this year. Maybe try a different marketing tactic than Hormozi-style action.

Stealing is the radical acceptance that you can’t take it all, so you might as well take the most valuable stuff, and leave the rest.

When you see another guru selling you a way to talk to God, steal the stuff that works, and leave the 3 years of membership fees. Be quick, be experimental, be agile.

With each thing you take, you’ll learn more about what really makes you you. Maybe theft is self-discovery! You’ll leave more on the table, be more generous as the Robin Hood inside you shares your bounty with others, and you’ll simply find a more original path in this life.

And by separating the useful and the useless, you’ll start to understand how all these systems work. Like a joke from David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” (Wallace, “This is Water”)

You’ll start seeing and feeling the water that you’ve made for yourself, that others have made for you. The world truly becomes new when you know that you can take and learn from anyone without having to give your whole brain to them.

You don’t need their ideology, you just need what might work for you. Steal more and find yourself.

Thanks for reading,

Dom