As a creative entrepreneur, I love bringing a new idea to manifestation from nothing. It’s one of my favorite things about business, opportunity, etc.

But you don’t always have to start from scratch. In fact, sometimes you probably shouldn’t.

Another way to talk about this is the concept of “modeling” something that is already working. Thousands of years ago, the writer of Ecclesiastes told us there was basically nothing new under the sun.

This principle can be applied to many domains. After all, why read books or blogs? Why watch YouTube videos? Why record podcasts?

The answer is because people need a framework—a model—to start with. I used that same exact thinking when it came to creating the look and feel of this blog. Of course, I did not copy someone else’s work verbatim, neither did I use any of the same words, etc. But a huge inspiration for the look and feel of this blog was https://jamesclear.com.

This is an extremely popular blog, with a design that works. It is clean, simple, and gets the job done. You could spend hours creating something from scratch…but the task, at least in this case, was simple: Create something clean and professional, on a self-hosted domain.

Mission accomplished, in relatively short order.