I have two friends who, by every measure I was taught to respect, are not very bright.

Put them through a maths test, a geography test, an IQ test, whatever you like, and they would land somewhere around the bottom twenty percent. I am not exaggerating. One of them got through college only because another friend sat him down and explained the circulatory system by drawing a bus route, the blood going round like a bus stopping at its stops. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

But line the three of us up by money made instead, and the whole thing inverts. They have both made more than me. And not by luck, which is the part that took me a while to swallow.

The first one runs a gym, aimed squarely at women who want to build their glutes. He did not invent that. He flew to LA, saw a gym already doing exactly that, and copied it all. The layout, the offer, the Instagram posts, the reels, more or less frame for frame. Then he took the whole package home and ran it, and it works.

The second did the same trick in nightlife. He went to Ibiza, watched what the clubs out there were doing, and carried it home more or less intact. Neither of them had a single original idea in the whole enterprise. Both of them are doing very well.

So intelligence, or whatever the tests are actually measuring, does not predict ability to earn. It seems a far better predictor is ability to stand to copy.

And standing to copy is not really about the world’s opinion. It is about your own. These two are entirely at peace being copycats. Call them unoriginal to their faces, and they will shrug, because their sense of being worth something was never once linked to originality. They just don’t care about it. Or to be smug, they don’t have the capacity to care.

I, more intelligent, less monetarily successful, am completely tied up in not being a copycat, and that is the whole of my problem. Everything I make has to be new, has to be unmistakably mine and not lifted from anyone, because making something original is the only way I have ever known how to be proud of my work. And underneath that sits the thing I do not enjoy naming, the constant voice that says if I ever just copied what already works, I would stand revealed as a man with no special anything.

So my cleverness, the quiet thing I have always ranked myself a notch above these two with, turns out to be welded to a need that kills every proven, boring, profitable idea the instant it appears, just because someone else thought of it first. They are free in the exact place where I am chained.

The copyable money is there for the taking. It has been there for years. And I still cannot make myself reach for it, because reaching for it would destroy the mirage of me doing original things, and without that mirage I’m not special by any measurable standard. I am still trying to figure out why I need to feel special in the first place.

And in the meantime, maybe one day I will be hungry enough to lift the working thing and bank the money the way they did, and feel nothing, and be fine. Or maybe the need to be original is load-bearing, and the day I set it down, I find out it was the only thing holding me up.