I’ve been stealing from all of you, and I don’t plan to stop

On influence, identity, and building something that’s actually yours

Someone once gave me a mug at work. It had the word ACE printed on it, because apparently I said it so much it had become a thing.

I found this delightful, obviously. What I didn’t say at the time is that I didn’t come up with ACE. A colleague I’d worked closely with for years used it constantly. At some point, without any conscious decision on my part, it migrated. Into my vocabulary, my slack messages, my everyday speech. By the time I got the mug, I’d forgotten it wasn’t mine.

I notice this more than most people probably do, because words are my thing. I am, at a surface level, a language magpie — I collect phrases, rhythms, ways of putting things, and I carry them long after the person who first said them has left the room. It happens without effort and without permission. Which made me wonder: how much of the way I think, work, and show up professionally actually originated with me? And does it matter?

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Everyone is standing on someone else’s shoulders

Language is just where I notice it most clearly. But the same thing happens with ideas, ways of working, how you run a meeting, what you think good leadership looks like, what you’re willing to tolerate and what you’re not. Every boss, colleague, company, and culture you’ve passed through has left something behind. Some of it you chose. Most of it you absorbed without realising.

We are, all of us, composites. And that’s worth sitting with for a moment, because the professional world has a strange obsession with originality. With the idea that the most valuable thing you can bring is something nobody has seen before. It sounds right. It’s mostly nonsense.

Take Substack. The founders have said openly that they were inspired by Ben Thompson, a writer who had built a successful paid newsletter called Stratechery. They saw what he had, believed more writers deserved the same, and built the tools to make it possible. Newsletter: not a new idea. Charging readers directly: also not new. And yet the combination, executed with a particular point of view at a particular moment, created something that genuinely changed how a lot of people think about writing, audiences, and what it means to have a voice. Including, for what it’s worth, me.

“It’s already been done” is one of the most corrosive sentences in professional life. It masquerades as realism. It’s usually just fear with better vocabulary.

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What stops us isn’t a lack of ideas

There are three places people get stuck with this, and they’re worth separating out because they feel different and they happen at different moments.

The first is before you start. The idea has already been done. The market is saturated. Someone smarter, further along, better resourced has already built the thing you were thinking about. So you don’t begin. You file it away, or more likely you just quietly let it go, and the moment passes.

This happens with businesses, with creative projects, with career pivots. But it also happens with something bigger: whole chapters of life. I’ve lost count of the number of mid-career professionals I’ve spoken to who have a version of the next thing they want to build, but won’t let themselves start because someone else has already lived something like it. The industry is crowded. The idea feels derivative. And so they stay put; not because they want to, but because the gap between where they are and where they want to be looks, from a distance, like territory someone else already owns.

Author Toni Morrison didn’t start from nowhere either. She wrote her first novel; The Bluest Eye, because she couldn’t find the book she wanted to read; one where Black girls were centre stage, with no codes or explanatory footnotes written for anyone else’s comfort. Novels existed. Stories about Black American life existed. But her particular version of it didn’t. She was 39, a single mother, working as an editor, getting up before dawn to write. The specific thing she had to say hadn’t been said yet. That was enough reason to start.

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The second failure mode comes after you’ve done the work. The thing exists; you’ve written it, built it, thought it through. But you won’t share it, because it feels too close to something else you’ve read or seen. So it sits in a drawer, or a folder, or a conversation you only ever have with yourself.

Even people whose work later became canonical felt this. Anne Sexton, one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century, once wrote in a letter:

“the feeling that I’m a fraud, that I didn’t write the thing but that I stole it somewhere.”

If Anne Sexton felt like a thief about her own poems, the rest of us are in reasonable company.

There is a third version of this that I hadn’t considered until I put an early version of this argument out into the world. It came up in the comments of a piece by Dr Sam Illingworth of Slow AI — a thoughtful collection of creatives describing how they actually use influence and borrowing in their practice. AI Meets Girlboss, a writer and visual creator on Substack, described hesitating to share the prompt that forms the foundation of her entire visual world, worried that others would simply replicate it and dilute what made it hers.

The opposite happened. It became her most engaged post. Rather than weakening her ownership of the style, sharing it publicly reinforced it. People tagged her. The style spread, but it spread with her name attached.

Which tells you something important: the fear of being copied is often as paralysing as the fear of copying. And it is just as misplaced. Sharing generously doesn’t erase what is yours. If anything, it stakes the claim more firmly than silence ever could.

All three of these are the same problem wearing different clothes. They’re not really about originality. They’re about permission; permission to begin, permission to be seen, and permission to be generous without losing yourself in the process. The thing quietly doing the damage in every case isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s the belief that your version, shaped as it is by everything and everyone you’ve absorbed, is somehow too fragile to survive contact with the world.

It isn’t. We’ll come back to that.

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Twelve notes, and everything ever written

Not all borrowing is equal, and it’s worth being honest about the full spectrum.

At one end sits outright plagiarism: taking someone’s words, ideas, or work and presenting them as your own. There’s no interesting debate to be had here. It’s indefensible, and everyone knows it when they see it.

At the other end sits something much harder to define: pure osmosis. The ACE mug. The phrases and rhythms and ways of thinking that seep into you through proximity, over years, until you can’t trace them back even if you wanted to. Nobody calls that theft because it doesn’t feel like a transaction. It just feels like becoming.

The interesting territory is everything in between. And music maps it better than almost any other field, because the arguments happen in public and the stakes are high enough that people fight about them properly.

Something most people don’t fully reckon with: all the melody and harmony in Western music is built from just 12 notes. Twelve. Every song you’ve ever loved, every track that made you pull over the car to listen properly, every piece of music that has ever made you feel anything — all of it assembled from the same 12 building blocks. The creative constraints are far tighter than we like to admit.

Which makes the Ed Sheeran copyright cases both inevitable and instructive. When your entire field operates within 12 notes, resemblances are going to happen. He faced multiple lawsuits claiming his songs borrowed too heavily from earlier work. Whether you think those claims had merit or not probably has as much to do with how you feel about Ed Sheeran as it does with music theory; he would not have been taken to court if he wasn’t famous. What’s true regardless: he dared to make something. He put it out. And whatever you think of him or his music, a lot of people genuinely love it. The dare came first. The argument about originality came after.

Compare that to sampling, where an artist takes a recognisable piece of someone else’s work, builds something new on top of it, and puts the influence right in the open. No pretence, no concealment. And the response, more often than not, is that people go mad for it. The original gets rediscovered. Both artists benefit. The dare, and the honesty about where you started, are the whole point.

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The power of admitting your influences

There’s a third move, one that people who are afraid of influence tend to miss entirely. And it’s actually the most generous one available to you.

When Derek Hughes — a writer with nearly 7,000 Substack subscribers — replied to my original note on this subject, he said something which was the inspiration for this article:

“The distance between plagiarism and inspiration is where your voice actually forms.”

I could have taken that idea and folded it into my own argument without mentioning him. Nobody would have known. But quoting him directly does something that paraphrasing doesn’t: it borrows his authority as well as his thinking. I’m not the only one who believes this; here’s someone with nearly 7,000 readers who believes it too. Association, honestly declared, is its own form of credibility. The people who are so afraid of being seen to borrow that they never cite anyone are quietly cutting themselves off from one of the most powerful tools available to them.

Karo (Product with Attitude) gives us a beautiful example of this in her post describing a trust-based backlink system (check it out - it is genuinely brilliant!) She brings in the expertise of Kathleen Marrero to add substance and compelling detail to her argument of what backlinks actually do for us. We are not left thinking; ‘I’m shocked by how little Karo knows about SEO’ - quite the opposite - we walk away with additional and complementary knowledge on the subject which credits both the author and her expert advisor. Karo is not stealing Kathleen’s knowledge, but by borrowing it publicly, she is giving both her AND Kathleen an excellent platform on which to be recognised.

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Everything they left behind

The people who shaped you — good bosses, nightmare bosses, brilliant colleagues, industries you’ve outgrown — gave you raw material. All of it. You didn’t choose most of it. But you’re carrying it.

The mid-career moment — that particular restlessness that arrives when you’ve been good at something for long enough to wonder if it’s actually what you want — isn’t really about starting from scratch. Nobody starts from scratch. It’s about getting intentional; looking honestly at what you’ve absorbed and deciding what you keep, what you put down, and what you build on top of it that is genuinely, recognisably yours.

That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole project.

The people who do this well aren’t the ones who arrived from nowhere with wholly original ideas. They’re the ones who stole generously, consciously, and in ways that made the original proud rather than robbed. They read widely and admitted what they’d read. They borrowed phrases and frameworks and ways of seeing and then did enough with them that something new came out the other side. They dared to put it out, even when it felt too similar, too derivative, too close to something someone better had already said.

They were honourable thieves. And their work — and their lives — were richer for it.

So were the people around them.