Plagiarize to look awesome at your job

by Dale Davidson March 18, 2026

This week I was working on revamping how my government group designs and develops Tableau dashboards for the agency.

This is an ambiguous work task that could suck up all my time without producing anything of value.

Fortunately, I read an article last year that stuck with me that basically gave me 90% of what I needed.

I took the graphic below from the article and replicated it in PowerPoint and changed a few elements around to be context-specific to the project.

I "plagiarized" some ideas and a graphic from this article to help do my job better.

I haven't had a chance to go over it with my client yet but it's better than anything I could have done in the same time frame.

To look good to your client, you should do the same. Part of the value you bring as a 1099 is to bring in new ideas and contextualize them to your project.

Outside research, design templates, code snippets, and analytical frameworks are all good examples of stuff you can use in your day-to-day work.

You don't get extra points for generating work from first principles, so liberally use other people's work to help you do your job better.

If anyone asks you can still say you got it from X article or Y author. But you will still get the credit for using it on the project.

Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.