[rahimnathwani]

From a New Yorker article about another Chinese proverb， 邯郸学步：

"One of the best known is “Handan xue bu” (“learning to walk in Handan”), which refers to the story of a young man from the provinces who hears that the people of Handan are so sophisticated that they walk in a special way. He goes to Handan to learn, but, years later, he still hasn’t mastered the gait. Dejected, he heads home. He finds that he can’t remember his own way of walking, and has to crawl. The moral: don’t copy others, or you’ll lose yourself."

[m463]

Ha, I was thinking on a different axis.

"All my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific." - Lily Tomlin

[woko]

That was my thought as well after reading the first comment on this page, about identifying the roots of these traits and about avoiding superficial copies.

It is important to try to be yourself, know your strengths and accept your weaknesses. Because if you don't and blindly try to copy others' qualities, you are likely to have a wrong and superficial understanding of the way these traits are acquired. Due to the superficial understanding, the attempt to copy the traits is likely to fail in some cases, and get you crawling desperate about how you could not achieve your target.

Naturally, there is truth on both sides. Maybe the piece advice should have been: *be attentive* to remarkable traits in people around you, then *be inspired* by their good traits and try to avoid replicating their bad traits. The important parts are the self-consciousness and the effort to improve oneself.

[peterlk]

When I was in college, this video really stuck with me: https://youtu.be/FxF-mxuv4uI

The relevant quote (and my favorite quote from it) is:

> Stop trying to be Mark Zuckerberg, because the best you can possibly do is second place.