I had an aha moment this week.

My student Sarah (her real name—I sometimes include real names with permission when I feel the topic is benign) wanted to chat about how to prepare for her upcoming summer internship at a private equity firm. Sarah is on the basketball team and her athletic commitments have prevented her from taking internships in prior years.

While we covered all sorts of business and career stuff, the part of this conversation that really hit, viscerally, for me was Sarah’s description of her learning process. Sarah loves art and painting, and seems to be quite good at it. She told me that she learned how to paint not by looking at something and trying to paint it herself, but rather by taking other people’s paintings and tracing over them, over and over. Somehow, by copying someone else’s work with extreme precision, Sarah reverse-engineered their creative process.

It hit for me because I have been doing something similar, subconsciously, for many years. But Sarah’s approach is much more deliberate than mine. She does it intentionally, with care and focus. I’ve been doing it passively, absorbing the styles and habits of other people without realizing it.

Tracing to Create Safety

I don’t know a lot about basketball so I may get some of this story wrong.

One thing Sarah has in common with fellow high performers like her classmates, like me, and like most of the readers of this blog is an underlying fear of not knowing, not being prepared. As we all know, that fear takes many of us out of the game before we even start.

Sarah said that her antidote to that fear of “I know nothing” was to copy the people above her.

Sarah started basketball relatively late, sometime in her early teens. She said that when she started, she was on the “C-team” and didn’t know what traveling was. (In basketball, traveling is a type of illegal movement.) The way she went from a C-teamer to being a Division 1 scholarship athlete at an elite program was, in her words, that she decided to “act like an NBA player.” Basically copying everything that she thought an NBA player would do.

“Tracing” others works because it reduces the stakes. By trusting that we can learn by copying, we can start to take action without needing originality or mastery. It’s a type of safety mechanism, almost like training wheels.

Tracing to Learn

Tracing is also an excellent way to learn.

I see Sarah’s tracing process as a form of empathic learning. Empathy is sometimes described as the ability to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and experience—thoughts, feelings—what they experience. When we trace someone else’s painting, over and over, we start to see the world the way that they do and reverse-engineer their thought processes. They had idea A, which led to sketch B, which led to painting C, but we start at C, trace over it many times, then discover underlying framework B, which leads us to intuit fundamental concept A.

In effect, with enough repetitions, we internalize their structure through an inductive rather than deductive process. Internalization is important, because this leads to identity change for us. When Sarah traces over the artist’s painting enough times, she essentially becomes that painter. Tracing doesn’t just reproduce the art. It transfers the mindset of the artist, giving us the ability to see the world through the artist’s eyes.

This is where I think a lot of the woo-ey “manifest your dreams” stuff loses the plot. Visualizing myself as an NBA player at some point in the future is different from imagining that I’m an NBA player today and taking all the actions that an NBA player would take. I think the latter is what Sarah is doing, and I think it’s much more effective.

From Tracing to Painting

The wonderful thing about this process is that when we trace for long enough, it’s inevitable that at some point we will start to paint on our own.

All creative work builds on creative work that came before it. Even if we were to learn everything we know by tracing other people’s paintings, at some point, those learnings will mesh and intertwine in our brains and that mixing will result in something new. That will be our unique footprint, our own twist.

Moreover, when the fear is gone, the mind starts to take risks. One risk that a mind that used to be afraid of “knowing nothing” might take with a blank canvas is to try to draw something, without having a painting underneath it to trace. This is like finally riding a bike without the training wheels. Fast, freeing, invigorating, but we never could have gotten there without a few months with the training wheels at the beginning.

(Incidentally, this is how most of us learn to cook. We start by knowing nothing. Then we copy other people’s recipes. Once we get comfortable with those recipes, we start mixing and matching and spinning up our own random creations in the kitchen.)

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing fear

What project, creative endeavor, new habit, or knowledge base have I been thinking about building but have been resistant to start due to fear?

This could be fear of not knowing how or where to start, fear that you’ll never master it, or any other form of resistance.

2)      Tracing

How can I find a way to trace the work of people better than me? Even if it is not a literal painting to copy, or a recipe to follow, can I copy the actions, habits, and thought processes of people that I aspire to be like?

Working with an AI tool can help with this. Tell ChatGPT or Gemini or whoever that you want to be more like someone that you admire, and ask the AI to come up with some basic actions that you can start copying.

3)      Start tracing!

Pick one small action to copy and start doing it every day!!!!