When you pressure yourself to be brilliant, you can often end up robbing yourself OF your brilliance. The idea that people and their ideas are coal, and that with enough pressure you can get a diamond is a lovely metaphor. But the reality is you may not work that way. You may not be a lump of coal that transforms into jewels under pressure. You may be a lump of coal that simply liquifies under pressure, changing yourself into fuel for someone else’s engine.
We’re all the same, in that we’re different. This sounds like a paradox, but only because the words are in English. The ideas can exist simultaneously with each other. So, maybe you aren’t coal. Maybe your ideas are caterpillars, sort of eating leaves on a tree or bugs or whatever, until it’s time to cocoon yourself and then out comes a butterfly, or a moth, or every once in a while nothing because something happened during metamorphosis and the caterpillar died.
Maybe you’re a hummingbird, and you flit from flower to flower, wings beating so fast, and then somewhere unseen, you start chirping your song.
When you see how other people do things, how they’re successful, it’s good to look for models that might work for you in what they do; maybe you’re the same as that other person. Or, maybe you can put the work in to make yourself change, and be like that other person, in which case their metaphors and methods will apply to you. But the important thing is, to find you, to be you, and find your own metaphors, and your own way. Your way may be the same as other people’s, and my goodness, that’s a lucky day, isn’t it? To find other weirdos who sort of do things the same way you do, like the same sorts of things. Or maybe your way is alone, on a mountain somewhere, dressed in robes, wind in your face, and my goodness, that’s a lucky day, too, isn’t it? Discovering you like to be alone with your thoughts, and that you do your best work this way.
That’s the most important thing, out of all the things.