A tailor from China, a patched suit, indeed, the tailor did it, and successfully made another suit exactly the same. However, the copied patch eventually became a sad failure.

What a pity! How unkind!

Even though he is highly skilled, he lacks innovation and just "copies and pastes" mechanically. How can he achieve real success?

I once watched a TV program about the imitation show, in which all the contestants were very similar to the imitated stars, and some even thought that the stars were present at first sight. On the gorgeous stage, their imitation won the applause of the audience, but did they succeed? I'm afraid not. For an imitator, if he just pours everything from another person into himself, the result can only be to live in the shadow of others, and only get a title like "Jay Chou in the Mainland, Michael Jackson in China", while his real name is known by several people, which will inevitably be buried and disappeared. This is not what they want.

As Hugo said, "Even if you successfully imitate a talented person, you lack his originality." Yes, as a person struggling on the road to success, you can imitate, but you can't imitate blindly.

Xu Linlu is a close disciple of Qi Baishi, and he was also a Ding Bai of painting art before he got started. However, after he officially got started, he stayed with Mr. Qi for a few years or so, with little success. His shrimp paintings have been imitated to perfection, and outsiders generally can't tell the difference between true and false, so he is very proud. Mr. Qi saw it in his eyes and only said eight words to him:

"If you learn from me, you will live as if I were dead."

Seems to be awakened by this sentence. Xu Linlu no longer just learned from Mr. Qi Baishi, but slowly understood the teacher's paintings with his heart, and finally got rid of the teacher's cocoon and opened up a new world on his own artistic road.

"If you learn from me, your life will be like my death", yes, if you learn from me, you will be better than blue in shine on you. Those people like me imitate my appearance, but they are just painting gourd ladle. Learning and imitation are of course essential stages, but we must not stop there. What is more important is exploration and innovation.

There was a way to steal in ancient times, and imitation is also a way today. We must not just copy it rigidly and deliberately, but have our own personality characteristics and principles on the basis of learning from others, in order to break out of our own sky. Otherwise, you can only make a suit with a patch on the back, be laughed at and eventually fail.