🏠 China isn’t copying anymore. It’s competing

GM! It’s Brett.

I’ve always believed how you feel about Halloween (or costume parties in general) says a lot about your future potential.

Simply put - people who actually enjoy dressing up in costumes tend to be more successful.

• Costumes are imagination made visible - and creative people build great things.
• They’re “fake it till you make it” in physical form - a rehearsal for confidence.
• And the most successful people in the world are also quite playful

Anyway, happy Halloween. Here’s me dressed as an emo kid.

I just got back from a family trip to Shanghai, and I realized I’ve been wrong about China my whole life.

Growing up, I thought of Chinese products as cheap, soulless copies of American ones. The “Made in China” sticker used to mean knock-off. Low quality. Derivative.

But China isn’t copying anymore. It’s competing. And in many cases, it’s winning.
And the playbook it used is surprisingly simple: Study. Copy. Outwork.

Study

When China opened up its economy, its entrepreneurs didn’t reinvent capitalism from scratch. They studied it.

They dissected American companies line by line - how Amazon scaled, how Silicon Valley funded, how supply chains worked, how consumers behaved.
They learned every variable before touching the equation.

And that’s exactly where most people fail in their careers.

They start doing before they start understanding.
They build before they benchmark.
They guess instead of study.

If you feel behind, start here: become a student again.

Study what’s working in your industry. Study the people who are winning - not just what they do, but how they think. Study patterns, not noise.

Everyone wants to be a visionary, but the truth is: most breakthroughs come from obsessive students who studied long enough to see what others missed.

Copy

Copying gets a bad rep - especially in the West, where originality is religion.
But originality is almost always the final stage of copying done well.

Google wasn’t the first search engine. Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone - it just made the best one.

China figured this out early.

The first wave of startups there were blatant clones: Baidu for Google, Alibaba for eBay, Didi for Uber.
Everyone laughed - until they realized these “copies” had adapted better to local markets, moved faster, and built more efficiently. And then the clones became category leaders.

Copying isn’t stealing. It’s learning through imitation.

It’s standing on someone else’s shoulders to see the next mountain.

Outwork

Once China knew what to do, it just outworked everyone.

The “996” culture - 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week - became infamous.
It’s not something to glorify, but it’s something to understand.

While others debated balance, they built. While others optimized for comfort, they optimized for compounding.

That’s what effort does - it compounds.

If you’ve studied the right playbook and copied the right model, the differentiator becomes output.

People underestimate how fast momentum builds once you stack enough days of focus.
Do this for 90 days and you’ll lap people who’ve been “trying” for years.

This is how China moved from being behind to being ahead - decades of collective 996 energy turned imitation into dominance.

And it’s how individuals do it too.

This isn’t just macro-economics - it’s a personal growth system.

Let’s say you’re stuck in your job.
You’re mid-career, watching others accelerate.

Here’s your roadmap:

Study: find 3 people doing the job you want and reverse-engineer their path.
Copy: steal their systems - their morning routines, writing habits, tools, workflows.
Outwork: execute them harder for 90 days.

It sounds simple because it is.
But most people will never do it - because they’re waiting for permission, passion, or a perfect plan.

The funniest part?
After decades of being labeled “copycats,” China is now the one being copied.

Its electric cars are outselling Teslas in Europe. Its consumer apps (WeChat, Douyin) are being cloned in the U.S.
Its factories build half the world’s “original” innovations.

That’s how progress works - today’s imitators become tomorrow’s templates.

And that’s what can happen in your career too.

Because the only real difference between being behind and being ahead is how long you’re willing to stay a student - and how hard you’re willing to work once you know what to do

Alex started this experiment with no idea. Literally none.
Just a blank page and a goal - to go from no idea to fully working app using only AI.

Finding and shaping the idea

He began with Idea Browser, a tool that scrapes Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and social feeds for pain points and trends.

One caught his eye: “Wellness App.”
High volume, low competition, and aligned with his own habits. That was enough.

He copied the trend link and dropped it into ChatGPT (GPT-5) with a structured prompt: “You’re a professional app builder. Read this trend and give me three high-quality app ideas with name, summary, features, and why it would work today“

Out came 3 options. He blended the best parts into one:
Habit Flow - a wellness habit tracker that adapts to your energy levels and gives AI-powered micro-nudges throughout the day.

Turning an idea into a blueprint

Before writing a single line of code, he asked ChatGPT to create a Product Requirements Document (PRD) in markdown - project.md.

It laid out everything: user personas, problem statement, features, data model, user flows, monetization, and success metrics. This became the playbook his AI agents would follow.

Hiring the AI employees

Inside VS Code, with the OpenAI Codex plugin, he began assigning roles.

Local agents

Cloud agents

While the local agents coded the app, the cloud agents worked asynchronously on strategy, design, and growth - all at once.

Testing, shipping, and researching

The MVP went live: onboarding flow, energy check-ins, habit selection, and adaptive plans that adjusted automatically.

To validate the idea further, he used Idea Browser’s “Research Your Idea” agent - it generated a full market report and prompt library for emails, ads, and landing pages.

Launching the scrappy way

No ad spend. No agencies. He posted a single tweet: “Been obsessed with wellness lately, but can’t think of habits to implement. Anyone else have this problem?“

People replied.
He DM’d them beta links, collected feedback, and iterated.

Then before going to bed, he sets up three new Codex tasks - features, documentation, or growth loops.

When he wakes up, progress is waiting. His 8 AI employees work overnight.
One person coordinating eight AI agents - building, marketing, and iterating in parallel.

Watch the full process here.

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Last week’s poll:

How do you handle distractions when your brain refuses to focus?

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ I change environments (different room ,café, coworking, etc.) ⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I use focus tools (Pomodoro, timers, noise apps)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I go full monk mode (no phone, no tabs)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I just give in and wait for the dopamine to return

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