The strange thing about a playbook is this: the moment it comes into existence, it begins to decay.
What was once greatness turns, almost instantly, into mediocrity. Not because the ideas lose power, but because the moment something is codified, it stops being a living force. A playbook is a fossil of a person’s creative journey—not the journey itself. And it is the journey, not the fossil, that holds the magic.
Think of Aristotle’s Poetics. The man wasn’t trying to give future screenwriters a template for three-act structures. He was thinking aloud—analyzing tragedy, probing why human beings respond to catharsis, trying to study an art form he loved. The greatness lay in that process of inquiry. But what happens centuries later? We turn it into a mandatory structure. A rigid spine. A “rule.” No wonder films that follow the three-act structure to the T often feel predictable. They are following the residue of someone else’s thinking, not thinking on their own.
Or take Stanislavski. His acting “method” was born from decades of experimentation, failure, reinvention, and curiosity about human behaviour. But when later actors and institutions froze it into one definitive playbook—“the Method”—it drifted into caricature. Actors began performing a technique rather than exploring truth. Isn’t that the shift every creator dreads?
Even in modern creative work, we celebrate the ones who write the playbooks—Pixar’s storytelling rules, Vogler’s Hero’s Journey, Campbell’s monomyth—without remembering that these people were first explorers. They stumbled, questioned, observed, discarded, rewrote. The playbook became great because it condensed years of obsession. But when followers copy it without adding or subtracting, all they can produce is a faint echo.
So my argument is this: the true artist is the one who creates the playbook. Everyone else is just referencing footnotes.
But is that too extreme a stance? Isn’t it also true that every artist begins by imitation? Didn’t Picasso learn realism before he broke it? Didn’t Indian classical musicians spend years perfecting someone else’s raga before discovering their own voice? Should we discredit those stages? Or is the real problem not imitation, but getting stuck there?
The more I think about it, the more I feel the danger is not the existence of playbooks; it is our reverence for them. We treat them as sacred texts instead of stepping stones. We forget that even great thinkers—Buddha, Nagarjuna, Basavanna, Tagore—did not want followers who obeyed. They wanted seekers who questioned. Isn’t it ironic that we turn their rebelliousness into doctrine?
And now, with AI, this rigidity becomes even sharper. AI excels at reproducing patterns: structures, formulas, templates. Which means playbooks become harder and more ossified than ever. If you aren’t injecting your own agentic, strange, unpredictable spark into the system, your writing will slowly flatten into everyone else’s writing. Isn’t that already happening on Instagram, where every carousel looks the same? In startup culture, where every founder “tells their story” in the same arc? In films, where we can predict the exact beat before it happens?
This is why I believe playbooks must be treated as bases, not crutches. A foundation, not a prison. A compass, not a cage.
But then again, am I underestimating how comforting a playbook can be? For beginners, doesn’t it reduce overwhelm? For teams, doesn’t it create alignment? In markets, doesn’t it create consistency? Perhaps the issue isn’t the playbook at all—but our refusal to outgrow it. Is that the real artistic failure?
Here’s what I keep returning to:
The moment a playbook is created, the creator must move on.
And the moment a follower picks it up, their responsibility is to ruin it. To twist it, break it, reinvent it, disrespect it lovingly. Otherwise we will keep producing content that feels increasingly correct—but increasingly lifeless.
And maybe that’s the real question I want to leave you with:
If every playbook represents yesterday’s creative journey, then what playbook are you writing today? And more importantly—what are you willing to destroy to write it?