I was thinking about this Bruce Lee quote:

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

It got me thinking about a bunch of different things. A lot of what I do for Machine involves making things and putting them out into the world: social media videos, written things like this email, podcasts, and more.

Sometimes I feel a little resistance when making these things. Thoughts like “Will people find this valuable?” tend to pop up. What I often don’t realize when those thoughts come up is that I’m usually thinking about specific groups of people.

For example, when I put out educational graffiti videos, I think about people who are better than me not finding any value in them. The problem with that thinking is that the video probably isn’t made for them. They can discard it, while people who are just starting out may find a lot of value in it.

There’s no need to feel resistance just because a specific group of people won’t find value in what you’re making. There’s probably another group that will.

I was also thinking about this from the consumer side. In art and graffiti, copying someone’s stuff is frowned upon, but we all learn from other people. When looking at someone else’s work, we absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is our own. That’s how things evolve.

In graffiti, most of us do some sort of highlight on our letters. The reality is, there was a first person to do this. Someone else was inspired by it and started doing it, then others followed. Now this specific thing is part of probably 99% of graffiti pieces.

Is that plagiarism or inspiration? Maybe it was “biting” in the early days. Maybe a bunch of people had the same idea around the same time. Who knows? Either way, the evolution of styles works this way.

Before social media, we had more regional styles. LA graffiti had a style, New York had a style, and so on. Now that everything is accessible, it’s harder to tell where someone is from. There are still specific characteristics that developed in those areas, but they’re no longer limited to people in those places.

People outside of Philly are doing handstyles developed there. People who didn’t come up in the ’90s in LA are doing things similar to what we were doing back then. This is another example of people absorbing what is useful and making it their own.

I don’t think this is good or bad. It just is.

The same principle applies whether you’re making something or learning from someone else: take what helps, leave what doesn’t, and add something of your own.

— Bus