Ryan Hawk says the Beatles were afraid to play their own music and started by copying others verbatim

The Beatles, in Ryan Hawk’s telling, did not arrive from Liverpool already wearing the halo of genius. On Young and Profiting, Ryan Hawk says they were “afraid to play their own music initially” and became great by copying other people’s songs first.

This is the rare productivity-podcast anecdote that is both useful and dangerous, like a chef handing you a knife and saying, honestly, most people should start by chopping exactly like someone better than them. Hawk’s book, The Price of Becoming, is built around compounding practices, which is business-book language for the least sexy truth in the world: do the thing, then do it again, then keep doing it after everyone else has discovered pickleball.

They’d always they they had written their own stuff. They were afraid to play their own music initially. So those long marathon sessions initially they’re covering other people’s music.

The Beatles example lands because it punctures the TED Talk version of creativity, where the genius descends fully branded, emotionally fluent, and ready for a Criterion Closet video. Hawk’s argument is less glamorous: the first draft of greatness is often mimicry. You copy the people you admire because you don’t yet have the muscles to do anything else.

So this is one of the greatest bands of all time started by copying others verbatim. Okay, imitate then innovate.

Copying is not the sin. Staying there is.

Hawk is right in the broad shape of the thing. The early Beatles were a working band before they were a myth, playing covers, grinding through long sets, learning taste, timing, stamina, and the small animal violence of being good live. That is different from pretending theft is artistry. Hawk is not saying to steal someone’s finished product and slap your LinkedIn headshot on it. He is saying that fluency comes before originality.

That distinction matters because business media is full of people who hear “copy the best” and somehow end up cloning a landing page, a podcast intro, and a personal brand color palette named Founder Navy. Hawk’s better version is apprenticeship. His first sales job, he says, involved listening to top reps, repeating their lines, then gradually adding his own personality. It is cover songs before songwriting. Karaoke, then craft.

The eyebrow-raise is that Hawk makes mastery sound more orderly than it feels. “Imitate then innovate” is a gorgeous little phrase, almost too gorgeous, the kind of thing that could be printed on a conference tote bag next to a sponsored protein bar. In real life, imitation and innovation are messier roommates. You copy, you cringe, you find one phrase that sounds like you, you copy again, you hate yourself, you get better. Still, as career advice, it beats the fantasy that your authentic voice should show up before you have earned one.

The hard part is that effort does not count unless it becomes value

Hawk’s Beatles riff is not floating by itself. It is attached to the coldest line in the episode, the one every ambitious person claims to believe until a promotion goes to someone else. Hawk says nobody owes you a trophy for effort. The market, the team, the audience, the spouse, the customer, they are all asking the same brutal question: did you make this better?

Nobody literally nobody cares how hard you work. They care about the value you can provide to them.

That is the useful corrective to the copying claim. Hawk is not giving beginners a hall pass to be derivative forever. He is saying imitation is one way to build enough skill to create value. If the work never becomes valuable, your beautiful discipline is just a private CrossFit class for your ego.

This is also where his advice on networking gets sharper than the usual “go to more events” mush. Hawk says the best networking tool is excellent work, which is annoying because it deprives everyone of the fantasy that there is a secret room full of important people waiting to be impressed by your lanyard.

The best way to network with amazing people is to put out amazing work and have them come to you.

There is a bit of survivorship bias baked into that. Plenty of good work dies in obscurity. Plenty of mediocre work has a better publicist. Hawk knows that too, and he says there is no guarantee, which keeps the advice from curdling into hustle-guru nonsense. But his center of gravity is sound: if you want better rooms, better collaborators, better luck, make something people can actually use.

The episode keeps circling the same stern little gospel of leadership: consistency compounds, curiosity compounds, writing clarifies thinking, and your job is to add value before you complain about not being seen. The Beatles anecdote is the sticky version of that whole worldview. Start as a cover band if you have to. Just don’t build your whole life around applause for the cover.