No Copy and Paste Route to Success

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, so goes a popular saying. Deep down, we all want to succeed at whatever we set out to do, either to make a living, have fun or make our unique contribution. Success has principles that are no respecter of persons. There is no substitute for hard work. Working smart is in the context of hard work. Smart and lazy will not take you the distance, especially if you desire to stand apart from the crowd. Copying is not the way to go.

Since I spend a lot of time on the internet, I seem to come across a lot of folks trying to make money online through copy and paste. They copy others’ content, paste on their sites and pass it off as their content. This is very rampant in job sites and directories. Plagiarism and copyright violations are a white collar crime, and since the long arm of the law does not yet descend heavily on it these shores do not make it okay. It is sowing bad seeds. You cannot sow bad seeds and pray for crop failure. A harvest always comes thereafter somewhere down the road.

Copy and paste goes beyond content into ideas and concepts. It is a mindset, a mindset of switching off your brain and letting others do the thinking for you. Albert Einstein said that thinking is hard work, and that is why very few indulge in this pastime. You may think something is common sense but for some, it is rocket science. People do not want to work out solutions themselves. They want it packaged for them in microwave-safe packages. I was amazed some days ago when I popped into a neighborhood supermarket with my wife to pick up some groceries, and at the checkout was held up by a married woman with kids with a mountain of already made local soups frozen and ready to eat. In the Western world, that is normal, but in Africa, it looks very strange. Taking a shortcut has become an epidemic.

This lack of originality is very glaring in the IT world, media, and entertainment. Ideas typically originate from UK and US and we copy wholesale. From social media to game shows to reality shows. We wait for the UK and the US to lead the way, then we wake up from slumber, copy and paste. Bingo! We could not even find a suitable name for our movie industry. We grabbed the name Hollywood by the scruff, knocked off the H, and replaced it with N – Nollywood. Bingo! Anytime we want to start something, rather than look on the inside, we look across the Atlantic.

I went to University in the early 80s, when you have to book an appointment to see the magical wonder called the computer which had its home in a shrine somewhere in the computer science department. You cannot go empty-handed, you had to take an offering in the form of punch cards, perforated with holes that made no sense to mere mortals. That is what the contraption fed on, before spitting out the prized output in a long reel of paper sometimes up to a mile long.

Those were the days before cut and paste. Then we photocopied or “xeroxed”. When you pick content from others, we called it “dubbing”. Straight dubbing is today’s cut and paste. The pros went a step further. We called it creative dubbing. You pick content from your neighbor, work on it, garnish, and improve it before you output. In assignments or tests, the “dubber” gets better marks, as he is the improved version. The dubbed material is just the raw material. The dubber processes it and adds value before pasting. Sometimes the owner of the original picks something useful from the improved version to further improve the original. Nowadays no one bothers, simply copy and paste.

The sad thing about the copy-and-paste mentality is the killing of initiative in the direction of original thinking. You are a photocopy, always a step behind. You cannot go in front because you have no clue where the destination is. You have to wait for the original to make the next move before you follow suit. You operate under the shadows of others, with no mind of your own. That is hardly the way to excel.

At the root of the copy-and-paste mentality is low self-esteem. You believe you have nothing unique to offer the marketplace, so you copy others. Nothing can be further from the truth. We are all unique and have something unique to offer. Our job is to dig inside and find the gold. Blindly copying others is also mental laziness. We don’t want to put our brains to work and bring something unique to the marketplace. The sky is big enough for all of us. All we need to do is to discover our true selves and gifts and begin to offer it. There is no copy-and-paste route to success. Success is when you become the best that you can be, and offer all that you can offer. Copying others does not come anywhere close.