4 Stages of Creativity

This weekend I had the pleasure of traveling home to NJ for my brother's birthday.  On a walk through the woods Sunday morning with my wife, my father and two family friends, (one of whom has become clinically addicted to wood turning) and the topic of creativity came up.   Given my designs as a medical entrepreneur, the creative process is something that I have thought and read on greatly. It appears to me that creativity comes in 4 stages:

1.  Copying.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  We all learn our first skills by copying those around us.  It is frowned upon to submit your copied work as original, but copying itself allows us to reverse engineer the creative process.  Even though we know the "solution" that we are copying, the manner in which we arrive begins to define a personal style.  I started writing by copying sentences painfully out of grammar books.  Any great band starts as a cover band.

2. Mixing.  Once we have copied enough different people, we begin to put granular el…