Try harder to be someone else

David Heinemeier Hansson (in Signal v Noise) sees the upside in wanting to be like people you admire:

‘Just be yourself!’ is commonly served as encouragement for people facing challenges in life. Whether that be in personal relationships or job hunts or speaking at a conference. If you’re already the perfect person, that’s sound advice. If not, it’s worth closer examination.

Whoever you happen to be right now, at this very moment, is highly unlikely to be the person you ultimately want to be. Maybe you occasionally have a short temper. Maybe you don’t know as much about programming or speaking at conferences as you’d like to. Maybe you procrastinate too much.

Whatever it is, you could probably stand to be more like other people in a bunch of areas. Being content merely being ‘you’, and whatever incremental iteration on that concept you can scrape together, is a sigh of resignation.