It's That Deep

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you only have an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is nor can, tell that person has excepted it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon or Newton? Every man is a unique."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson