In his essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson lays out a major part of his Transcendentalist philosophy. In this essay, he talks about how it is vitally important for each person to follow his (or her) own path, his or her own conscience. He is vehemently against conformity and against the idea that people should bow to the dictates of society.
Because of this, he argues that everyone, in the course of their education, should come to this same conclusion. They should conclude that they must do things their own way. As he puts it, they learn that
envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion
This quote tells us that we learn (or at least we should learn) that it is stupid and suicidal to try to be (or want to be) like others. Instead, we need to be who we are.
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