Insist on Yourself

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but their Maker can teach them. No one yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?

Ralph Waldo Emerson—Self-Reliance (1841)