With the Beatles in the news so much these days, it’s revealing to look back at the band’s earliest days. They weren’t original — quite the opposite. As we see (and hear), they faithfully worked at copying other people’s work, right down to Buddy Holly’s hiccupy vocals. For them, as for the rest of us, originality happens much later, after you build the platform of skills. And the best way to build that platform is to imitate, copy, mimic — to fire the circuit over and over toward a clear goal and see how close you can get. (The same philosophy apparently applies to hairstyles.)