# Cloning Over Originality

#concept #method

## Summary

Originality is a *downstream* product of copying, not an upstream input. Copy proven approaches at 10,000% first, adapt later — and copy the boring parts, because success is a thousand small decisions rather than one brilliant one. Now fully sourced from [[2026-06-15-how-to-get-rich-cloning]] (the [[mohnish-pabrai]] case study), no longer only via the distillation.

`Status: two voices, two traditions; no dissent` (upgraded by lint 2026-07-29 — the label still read "well-sourced within its lineage / one advocacy video," which the sentence below had already superseded). Founding evidence is one advocacy video built around a single exemplar (Pabrai). **Update 2026-07-26: the thesis gained its first independent second voice** — [[oskar-hartmann]] ([[2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business]]), from a different tradition, with three fresh instances (below). Still no dissenting source.

## Current Understanding

**"Originality is downstream of cloning, not upstream."** Copy first at 10,000%, adapt second ([[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]]).

**Clone the boring parts.** Success is ~1,000 small decisions, not one genius move — so copy the morning routine, how distractions get handled, how time is defended. The instinct is to copy the visible strategy and skip the mundane operating habits; the claim is that the mundane habits are where the result actually lives.

**Letter of the rules > spirit of the rules — at the start.** "Spirit of the rules" is for masters; beginners use it to excuse skipping discipline. A sharp, self-aware constraint: it names the exact rationalization ("I understand the principle, so I don't need the practice") that lets someone feel advanced while doing none of the work.

**The Pabrai method — clone from multiple sources.** Buffett for investing, Munger for thinking, Graham for principles, philosophers for life decisions. Originality is an **emergent property of the combination**: nobody else assembled those same pieces the same way. This is the page's most load-bearing idea, because it dissolves the apparent conflict with [[methodology-as-moat]] — if you clone from one source you're a copy, but a specific combination is unclonable in practice even though each component is public. Whether combination alone is *sufficient* differentiation is unexamined; see Contradictions. Full case study — including the "$650k charity lunch with Buffett as *guru dakshina*" — on [[mohnish-pabrai]].

**Two illustrations of the discipline** (from [[2026-06-15-how-to-get-rich-cloning]]): the *food-channel story* — a friend's polished, subtitled, edited recipe channel grew slowly while the niche's top channel ran no subtitles, no music, ~30-sec videos; she cloned the format exactly → 100K then 500K views, and only then experimented. The *barber analogy* — nobody invents their own haircut technique on day one; you stand behind the best barber for weeks, copy everything, then branch. Both make the same point: **beginners mistake a proven operator's omissions for oversights**, when they're usually deliberate.

**The gas-station parable.** One station wipes windshields and checks tires for free, and has a queue. The station across the street watches this every day, never copies it, and goes bankrupt. The failure was not a lack of information — the winning move was visible daily and free to copy. It was **ego**. This is the whole page in one image: the barrier to cloning is almost never knowing what to clone.

**The independent second voice — cloning as an anti-intuition discipline** ([[2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business]], [[oskar-hartmann]], added 2026-07-26). Three instances from the VC/product world, each pairing cloning with *measurement* rather than taste:

- **Top utility-app studios "forbid themselves from inventing"** — they launch ~20 apps at once and let money vote ([[sell-before-build]]). Institutionalized anti-originality: the ban is the discipline.
- **Oliver Samwer's eBay clone for Germany**: copied all 100 features as non-working buttons, watched click logs, built in click-count order — "intuition deceives, always." Cloning plus instrumentation beats both invention *and* naive copying (he cloned the feature list but let *data* pick the build order).
- **The $5M robot-data founder** explicitly copied his playbook from 10 companies that had grown the same way on LLM-training data — clone the *business motion*, apply it to the adjacent market.

This voice adds something Pabrai's story lacks: Pabrai clones *judgment* (Buffett's decisions), Hartmann's cases clone *mechanisms and then measure* — which answers this page's standing worry that cloned strategy fails on unobservable details. If the details are unobservable, instrument them (Samwer's logs) instead of guessing.

**Why this belongs in a sales vault.** It's the meta-method behind every other page: [[sales-discipline]] is the boring part to clone; [[methodology-as-moat]] is the output; the ladder in [[offer-ladder]] was itself copied from a coach on a call.

## Evidence

- **Primary:** the whole thesis — 10,000%-or-nothing, clone-the-boring-parts, letter>spirit, multi-source combination, gas-station parable, Pabrai→Buffett case, food-channel and barber illustrations — [[2026-06-15-how-to-get-rich-cloning]]
- Condensed restatement: "Originality is downstream of cloning… копируй на 10 000%, потом адаптируй" — [[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]]
- Convergent (different author): "business buys a proven method, not uniqueness" — [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]] via [[methodology-as-moat]]
- **Independent second voice:** app studios that forbid inventing; Samwer's fake-button clone built in click order; the robot-data founder copying 10 LLM-data playbooks — [[2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business]] ([[oskar-hartmann]])
- Indirect: the [[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]] method is itself a cloned template (backwards math → ladder → deck)

## Related Pages

- [[mohnish-pabrai]] — the exemplar and his multi-source cloning
- [[methodology-as-moat]] — the moat is a *combination* of cloned parts, not an invention
- [[sales-discipline]] — the boring, cloneable operating habits
- [[niche-selection]] — "don't invent a novel service" is the same instinct applied to offers
- [[sell-before-build]] — the measurement half of clone-then-measure
- [[2026-06-15-how-to-get-rich-cloning]] — primary source
- [[overview]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- **Named figures are stated but unverified.** [[mohnish-pabrai]] now has an entity page and the primary video is ingested, but its figures (Buffett 31%/40yr, Pabrai ~$154M, the $650k lunch) are asserted by an advocacy video without citation — broadly consistent with public accounts, not independently checked here. Buffett/Munger/Graham are recorded on the Pabrai page as supporting cast rather than as their own entities.
- **Combination-as-originality is asserted, not argued.** If your combination is public (as it is, once you sell it), what stops it being cloned in turn — by the very logic this page endorses? The sources' implicit answer is that execution of 1,000 small decisions doesn't transfer even when visible; the gas-station parable supports this psychologically rather than structurally.
- Tension with [[niche-selection]]'s "go where AI is powerless": cloning is exactly what an LLM does well. A method assembled entirely from public, cloneable sources is more exposed to substitution than one built on private domain knowledge. Unaddressed by the source.

## Next Questions

- Which specific operators should be cloned for *this* vault's business, and which boring parts of theirs are actually observable?
- Does "clone at 10,000%" survive contact with a market that has already seen the original?
- Would a primary Pabrai source (his book/letters) confirm the "clone the boring parts" emphasis, or is it the video creator's gloss?
