Blaze your own trail

Not to brag, but I've been reading xkcd since before it was cool. The one from today struck a chord with me. Specifically, the second-to-last panel. It's been said many times, many ways before. I can think of a couple of other phrasings of it off of the top of my head: "Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the masters. Seek what they sought." and even "You cannot become that which you admire." The point of all of this is that I see so many people trying to succeed (by whatever metric success is measured by) by trying to mimic the actions of those that are considered successful. A lot of success, in my opinion, is circumstance. Being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the right people. So rather than try to duplicate success, try to figure out what those you consider successful were trying to accomplish rather than how they did it. You have talents that they don't. Use them to blaze your own trail.