Imitation is Limitation

When I matriculated at JKUAT in May 2007 to pursue an engineering degree, my Communication Skills lecturer named Prof. Paul Njoroge lent me Bill Clinton's memoir. I read the memoir with great interest after which I returned it to Prof. Njoroge.
Later on in December of that year, I purchased my own copy of Bill Clinton's memoir which I re-read twice in a span of three years. I still have that personal copy of the memoir; it is now dog-eared and falling apart because of too much referencing.
On re-reading Bill Clinton's memoir in 2010, I came to admire Clinton so much that I downloaded pictures of him from the web. I also listened to some of his speeches on YouTube. Of the few speeches of his that I listened to, the one that I enjoyed most was his 1993 inaugural address which he delivered in elegantly measured cadences.
My admiration for Bill Clinton mutated into a problem when I began imitating him. I sometimes plagiarized stories from his memoir for sharing with my friends via email and Facebook.
One Sunday in 2011, I used a quote in his memoir to tease the 9:30 a.m. English service choir of All Saints' Cathedral in Nairobi. Guess what the quote said? That "don't blame Jesus if you go to hell".
Although I liked the quote, some of the choristers didn't take it kindly when I told them not to blame Jesus if they went to hell. They grilled me a few Sundays later and instructed me to apologize for what I had said. I did apologize later on in 2012 in a speech I felt proud of.
Bill Clinton says in his memoir that he came across that quote on a bumper sticker. And here was me foolishly using it to tease a high-caliber choir.
Another way I tried to imitate Bill Clinton was seeking work at Kenya's Parliament when I was at the University of Nairobi in 2011. You see, Bill Clinton worked in the United States Congress when he was an undergraduate student at Georgetown University in the 1960s.
Do you know what happened when I sought work at Kenya's parliament? Well, I was denied access to the parliament buildings and when I became persuasive, the gatekeepers rudely turned me away.
Perhaps the worst imitation of Bill Clinton that I did was attempting to run for a senatorial seat in the 2013 Kenya's general elections like the way Bill Clinton ran for a United States Congress seat in the 1970s when he was in his 20s. And yikes! I failed to command the sort of respect and charisma that Bill Clinton radiated back in the 1970s when he was my age.
It dawned on me sometime last year that I failed to match Bill Clinton's standards since I hadn't hit the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: The Story of Success, says we must complete for us to succeed at whatever we are trying.
Bill Clinton became interested in politics when he was a boy by following on TV such political speeches as Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream". When he was in high school, he ran for a leadership post in a certain boys' organization and got elected. As a leader in that organization, he was selected to visit President John F. Kennedy in the White House.
Then when he was a first year student at Georgetown University, he was elected class president. During his holidays while he was still at Georgetown, he campaigned for his favourite politicians in his home state of Arkansas, an experience that made him learn a lot about his state as well as its people and politics.
Because of his proven track record of commitment to politics, he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. In his application essay for the Rhodes scholarship, he had written that he desired to study at Oxford so that he could "prepare for the life of a practising politician" and "mold an intellect that [could] stand the pressures of political life".
After a two-year stint at Oxford during which he read hundreds of books, Bill Clinton flew back to the United States to pursue a law degree at Yale University, one of the most prestigious universities in America. While at Yale, he campaigned for George McGovern - the 1972 U.S. Democratic party presidential candidate.
As you can discern for yourself, Bill Clinton had already hit the 10,000 hours of practice in politics by the time he was running for a United States Congress seat in his late '20s. And here was me foolishly imitating him by attempting to vie for a senatorial seat in the 2013 Kenya's general elections when I had no political experience. Little wonder that my campaign was a complete flop.
Moral of the story: imitation is limitation. So, as Oscar Wilde aptly put it, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." Adieu!
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RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on imitation is limitation, you might also enjoy another one on "Cultivating Love" in which I mentioned Bill Clinton. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.
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