There was a stretch where I studied what other people were doing and tried to reverse-engineer it.
Their positioning. Their tone. The way they structured their bios and their offers and their sentences. I figured if it worked for them, I could adapt it. Make it mine. Or close enough.
And for a while it did work. Sort of. Things looked right. The words sounded competent. I had something to post, something to point to, a direction that at least felt like a direction.
But there was this low-grade discomfort I couldn’t shake. Like wearing a jacket that fits your shoulders but not your arms. Close enough that no one else would notice. Not close enough to forget you’re wearing it.
I think copying works best when you don’t know yourself yet. It gives you something to stand behind while you figure it out. And that’s not nothing. Sometimes you need the scaffolding just to stay upright.
The problem comes later. When you start to sense what’s actually yours, and the borrowed structure starts pressing against it. When someone responds to the version you built from someone else’s template, and the recognition lands on a person you didn’t quite build from the inside.
That’s the hollow part. Not that it doesn’t work. That it works for someone who isn’t quite you.
I’ve watched people build audiences around a voice that wasn’t theirs. It looked successful from the outside. But every now and then you’d catch something — a post that broke pattern, a moment of honesty that didn’t match the brand — and you could feel the tension. The gap between who they’d become online and who they were when they stopped performing.
I don’t think copying is wrong. I think it’s a phase. One that gets uncomfortable when you’ve stayed in it longer than you needed to.
And the discomfort is probably the sign that something of your own is trying to surface.
I’m still figuring out what that looks like for me. But I know it doesn’t look like anyone else’s version.