The making of COPYCATS!

cop·y·cat

ˈkäpēˌkat/ Noun Informal derogatory

noun: copycat; plural noun: copycats; noun: copy-cat; plural noun: copy-cats

• (especially in children's use) a person who copies another's behavior, dress, or ideas.

  • denoting an action, typically a crime, carried out in imitation of another.

Humans, right from the day of origin, always want to head towards a process to achieve anything. Take fire for example, the first set of humans who created fire, immediately transmitted this knowledge to their community explaining the steps to create fire. With the advent of fire, humans were able to go up in the food chain, significantly rapid. Essentially, invention of fire has helped humans tame the food chain. Similarly, the fact that we follow a process has tamed invention - essentially taming humans to “Copy Cats”.

Here is what has happened:

Somewhere in the early 1950s (when India had to recuperate itself from the British colonisation), India chose to have “5 years plans”. While the concept helped us to focus on one problem and solve it better, there has been a lot of adverse side effects. While we chose to have more production of rice - we lost a lot of healthy traditional varieties of rice (just because it took time to grow), with rapid industrialisation - we started having jobs of one kind, killing many other kinds of jobs. While these kind of planning is necessary when India had to recuperate, it is also important to unwind these after the intent is relatively solved.

One such a thing is education. Right after colonisation, India wanted a lot of literates to fill-in the shoes of the roles created by British. Indian population needed financial stability to set things to a balance before moving ahead. So, we adopted the “Macaulay”s education system (Interesting read “Macaulayism”). This produced a lot of literates and also gave the necessary financial stability. But we totally forgot about unwinding it. As a side effect this has lead to taming invention.

The education system has lead to a place where everyone tries to mimic what their elders did (or) what their peers do (making them mere "copycats"). Just follow the process of reading, writing, getting more marks, getting to a good college, getting a good job - one will have financial stability. By bringing in a process like this, we pretty much end up killing innovation right there. Especially when the process by itself leads to a favourable outcome, “Money” (Is Money a favourable outcome is a food for thought?).

There is a thin line of difference between “Discovery” and “Invention”. Discovery is what you stumble upon where as Invention is creation. Eg. Vasco Da Gama discovered “India” and Thomas Alva Edison invented “Bulb”. In short - invention is creating something, discovery is finding something that already exists. The current education system has lead us to discover so many things, but the act of invention is slowly dying down.

For most of us, the role models are people who have many enough money by creating something (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and likes). Though we choose them to be role models, we fail to take what made them to be a model. It is the act of invention that made them big and not the financial abundance they achieved (it just happened to be an outcome).

Human beings keep evolving with whatever they choose to adopt in their life. The more we follow a process, we become copycats. The more we explore and innovate, we become inventors. Needless to say we need both in the ecosystem, but for sure inventors uplift the human society by and large.

If you are asking about "how can invention happen, what should I do?" The answer is there are no real steps to become an inventor. The moment you want to have steps for becoming an inventor, that defeats the purpose of it. Let loose the current education process (use it to learn), use the education - explore more - fail more - fail even more - you will learn/gain something.

“Success is just an intermediate point for exploring more".