Mindset Tip: Imitation can feel frustrating, but it’s also a sign that your work is impactful. Stay true to your artistic voice—it’s something no one else can duplicate.
“When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s going to work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I have to be honest: the first thing I can think, all those weekends that I could have at home with my family but didn’t. I think it’s theft, and it’s lazy.”
“Why escape your intended purpose by copying and trying to be someone else? You will discover who you were meant to be only after you have shown confidence being yourself.”
Since the Thai are not principle oriented, and with the high value for personal relationships, they also appear not to be strictly law-oriented. In practice, principles and laws are ever-adjustable to fit persons and situations. In other words, laws are rules laid out in papers; but what is wrong or right depends not on the rules, but instead on who the person is or whom the person knows. A prominent Thai businessman ironically described this phenomenon in a seminar:
We Thai are not a society of law; we are a society of relationship…. It is not what a person has done that’s wrong; it’s who he is…. If he is your cousin, or your friend, then what he has done is not wrong. But if another person does the same thing, and it’s somebody you don’t like, then what he has done is wrong…
Source: S. KOMIN, Psychology of the Thai People: Values and Behavioral Patterns. Bangkok, Research Center, National Institute of Development Administration.
“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.”
