I’ve been interested in the creator economy for a while now.

But I’ve always watched as a spectator, and never really dived in. Mostly because I didn’t know who I wanted to be in this digital world.

I’d see all these creators promoting all these “new business models”, but I never found anyone who actually understood me.

I wanted to make money sure, but I wanted to make money by being myself.

Then, one day, I discovered the legendary Dan Koe.

He popped up out of nowhere in my YouTube recommendations, and boom, it was like "what am I watching here?".

His ideas were genuinely interesting, every video was like eating Pringles chips, once you start, you can’t stop. But what struck me wasn’t that he made money, it was how he made it.Work 4 hours a day. Build digital products that work while you sleep. Write about things that interest you while promoting your stuff.But that’s a topic for another day.What I want to say is that for me, it felt like a kind of awakening. As if I had been asleep until that moment. And the funny thing is that he didn’t invent anything.He himself often says: “Nobody has original ideas” but because he was similar to me in terms of age, gender, goals, problems, the message resonated more.From there, I started following everything he did. Reading his posts, watching all his content, taking his courses. And in my mind, something happened:“I want to become like him.”Which soon turned into “I want to be him.”At first, it was a positive thing. He pushed me to become a better version of myself. If you follow Dan, you know how much he talks about lifestyle design, productivity, focus, and self-development in general.But eventually, it turned into a kind of obsession. It wasn’t inspiration anymore. Every decision I made had to pass through one question:“What would Dan do?”Which is not completely wrong.But before asking “What would Dan do?” I should have asked “What would I do?”.The more I tried to be him, the more I drifted away from myself. I was losing my identity. I was shaping myself around an idea of someone I wasn’t. When I realized this, I felt something wasn’t right.The thing is that it didn't just happen with him. It happened with other people too. I’m talking about him because he had a huge influence on me. But also with writers and creators like Tom Noske, Mark Manson, and even in music artists like Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Michael Bublé.Every time I admired someone, I wanted to become them. So I took a moment for self-analysis and reflection.Who am I really? Who do I want to be?And that’s when I realized that the problem wasn’t the imitation itself. The idea of imitation was right. But the method was wrong.I kept focusing on one person at a time. Following the same path: Zooming in, copying, obsessing. And that’s where I saw the mistake.So I tried something different.I started rebuilding my identity in a smarter, more natural way.Because imitation is like a compass, but if you don’t use it properly you're going to break it and end up lost.