Don’t Let a Copy+Paste Life Prevent You From Growing Into Who You’re Supposed to Become
For my sixth birthday, I asked my mom if we could invite all the “big boys” from our neighborhood to my birthday party at McDonald’s. I was always outside trying to act like them and convince them to play with me. When I turned eight, I decided my role model in life would be Steve Sax the 2nd baseman for the Dodgers. I watched every move he made and tried to emulate him when I played. When Vanilla Ice hit the scene, I stole my mom’s hairspray and practiced every night forming my hair into a perfect wave in the mirror. Becoming a Saved by the Bell addict, I would imagine and plan hijinks I could pull at my school, so I could reincarnate Zack Morris. At school, I studied what the cool kids wore and begged my mom to please take me to Miller’s Outpost, not TJ Maxx. I remember overhearing a guy I thought was cool mention a band he liked so I went straight to the Wherehouse and bought the CD. As I got older and started working, I would consciously watch how other people interacted in meetings and think about how I could be more like them. For a while, I copied every move of Shaun T on the Insanity DVD workout, until I tweaked my back and had to get physical therapy for months. Social media came along, and I admit a couple minutes scrolling through Instagram feeds can easily turn into twenty or thirty for me. I click on links that people I admire post, look up hotels they stay at on vacation, and search for where they got that hat.
Modeling our lives after others can be an incredibly effective practice. It’s how infants learn to eat, walk and talk. We’re taught in school how to copy the proper sentence structure, cursive handwriting, and art projects- not to mention how to behave through seven hours of a school day. Coaches and piano teachers show us the proper technique and then force us to reach for perfection through drill after drill. Parents reinforce the concept, too: “Sit up straight- look at your sister, she has perfect manners.” “You know, your dad played football in high school.” “Have you thought about majoring in Engineering? That’s what your Uncle Frank did- and look where he is now.” Copying others is an accepted practice to go through life well.
During one particularly boring office job that involved eight hours of spreadsheeting a day (is that a verb?), I remember with great celebration when I discovered the power of Ctrl+V three weeks into the summer job. I can’t imagine how inefficient my life would’ve been ever since then if my MacBook didn’t have the Copy+Paste function. Whether it’s copying something I need from another email chain or transferring work I’ve done in another format, I would have to do everything all over again on my own time, energy, and effort.
But living a Ctrl+V life can only take you so far. I just heard a statistic that only 1 person in 300,000 people alive has the same mix of talents and strengths you have. And even if you find that brother from another mother you’re going to discover that your expression of those same strengths looks decidedly different because of your values system, story background, and imagination of the future.
As you seek to grow in self-awareness, carve your own path, and write a great story with your life there’s going to come to a point when you need to consciously stop comparing yourself to others, stop trying to copy how they look, sound, and come across and be your own authentic self. It might feel incredibly risky or terrifying to be yourself, especially if you carry a dose of shame or guilt or a sense of self-hatred, but the choice has to be made nonetheless. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself stuck in a cycle of redundancy, hoping that if you could just copy someone else a little more perfectly then it might free you to the life you’ve always hoped for.


