Climb a creative family tree to grow your own branch

You don’t pick your family, but you do pick your creative ancestors. When you think of yourself as part of a lineage, the pressure to be “original” drops, and the drive to contribute rises. Start with one person you can’t stop returning to. Pull their early work, not just the polished hits. Notice how their voice wobbled before it steadied. That wobble is permission for yours to wobble too.

Now dig into their influences. Maybe your favorite filmmaker talks about a mid-century photographer you’ve never studied. Maybe your favorite coder learned from a mathematician whose notes are dense but playful. When you map these connections on paper, the tree stops being abstract. It’s names, arrows, and little notes like “use shorter sentences here” or “limit the palette to two colors.” The paper gets smudges on the edges and a coffee ring in the corner. Good. It’s becoming yours.

Make small studies for each branch. A student I coached wrote one page in the cadence of their hero, one page in the cadence of the hero’s hero, and so on. By the fourth study, they couldn’t imitate exactly, and that gap created something new. Two sentences they wrote in a bus station at dusk ended up anchoring their final piece. Small, specific studies compound faster than vague goals like “find my voice.”

This approach uses cognitive apprenticeship, a model where you observe, deconstruct, and practice with increasing independence. It also borrows from retrieval practice: when you re-create from memory and notes, you encode more deeply than by rereading. You’ll notice, too, that identity can be built from actions, not declarations. You do the studies, the studies reshape you. That’s the point of the tree: learn the roots, then grow a branch only you could grow.

Pick one hero whose work truly moves you and collect a handful of early pieces, interviews, and behind-the-scenes notes. From there, identify three people they learned from and jot what each offers you—a constraint, a habit, a structure. Draw a simple tree on paper and mark those takeaways under each name. This week, make four tiny studies, one from each branch, keeping the scope tight so you actually finish. As you work, note where you can’t imitate cleanly and lean into that difference. That’s your branch starting to grow, so schedule the next study session now.