If You Want To Get Ahead, Steal Like an Entrepreneur

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I have a confession.

I’m a no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing thief.

My success as a solopreneur has come from those who came before me. I’ve stolen, tweaked, and imitated my way to success.

Fortunately, all the great entrepreneurs and creatives I know are thieves. If something works, you take it and make it your own.

Steal a working business model. I did.

There’s a difference between stealing Tim Ferris’ idea to use journal prompts as a lead magnet and offering his lead magnet as your own. I want to make that abundantly clear right off the bat.

Calling what I’m talking about “taking inspiration” would be fair, but I’m calling it what it is: stealing.

The ultimate example comes from the buff business baddy Alex Hormozi, who has said in countless places that if you’ve never started a business before, look at an existing service business and deliver in half the time. That’s how you steal like an entrepreneur: take the core idea of what’s working and make it your own.

My first business success came from creating niche sites. Was I ever the first niche site in that space? Hell no. I just committed to writing better content than my competition and found my success that way.

I found a Reddit thread where someone explained his process for building a niche site and more or less copied it step by step. You could easily say I stole his process for building a niche site.

What else to steal

I didn’t just stop there when it came to my thievery. I stole from dozens of niche sites to create something unique and valuable.

I’d find a WordPress theme I liked on someone’s site and find where they bought it.

I’d notice an article layout that worked well for SEO and replicated it with my writing.

Even today, when I began offering podcast coaching services, I looked at the types of pain points other people were addressing and used them to guide my copy and my offer.

Justin Welsh’s course Content OS explains how he looks at winning tweets and LinkedIn posts and turns those into templates he can use. I won’t go into the details, you can buy the course for that if you haven’t already, but it’s an important distinction. You steal the base layer and dress it up yourself.

Copy and pasting someone else’s tweet is wrong. Using the layout as inspiration to craft your message is how you get ahead.

When stealing doesn’t work

Don’t copy and paste someone’s work. That’s wrong, and frankly, it won’t get you anywhere. I could start copying and pasting Justin Welsh’s tweets, but I wouldn’t get his results because people want to hear them from him. They don’t care about me yet. And you can only make them care by showing who you are.

I made this mistake a few times in another life when I started a daily blog in the style of Seth Godin. I liked his daily posts and wanted to emulate something similar.

The problem was I was writing posts exactly like Seth Godin wrote them. I didn’t copy and paste, but I used his voice and style, which meant none of my personality came through in my writing. I was just a parrot doing a cheap imitation. No one cared.

It also became exhausting and uninspiring to sit down and write. I wasn’t really doing my own work, and so my creativity and enthusiasm for the project started to wane. I carried on for months out of momentum, and it became a daily chore rather than a delight. 270 days of daily writing were wasted because I was trying to be someone else.

If you steal too much from one person, this is what happens. By stealing parts from different inspirations, you can begin to craft your own originality.

Stand on the shoulders of those who came before

You don’t have to be a pioneer to be an entrepreneur. Sure, you have to offer something people can’t get anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean you have to be completely self-reliant. Why bother hand-coding a landing page when you can build one for free on Carrd?

As a new idea becomes established, it slowly changes from one company stealing an idea from another to just following the new normal.

Today, blue is one of the most common colors for a logo because, according to color psychologists, “blue conveys professionalism, trustworthiness, and credibility.” What they miss out is that people think those things when they see a blue logo because they have dealt with big, trustworthy brands that use blue in their logos.

So, when a new business needs a logo, people suggest blue. But it’s become so ubiquitous that no one considers it stealing anymore.

Copying is wrong, but entrepreneurship has a long history of stealing from what came before. You don’t need to invent a new wheel to pull your cart.

P.S. The idea for this article was stolen from Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist

P.P.S Who gets the reference to the no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfathe?

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Much love from my screen to yours,