Mimicry precedes understanding — this is one of the more unsettling findings to emerge from developmental psychology, and it applies well beyond childhood. Donald Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst, argued that the self doesn't develop from the inside out; it develops through being reflected back. We learn what we are by watching others react to us, and we learn what to want by unconsciously mirroring the desires of people around us. The philosopher René Girard built an entire theory around this — mimetic desire — the idea that humans don't choose what to want, they catch wanting from each other like a contagion. In business, this explains phenomena that rational-actor models can't: why markets bubble not because people assess value independently but because each person watches what adjacent people are doing and amplifies it. The practical edge here is this: most of what feels like your own conviction — your career ambitions, your product preferences, your sense of what success looks like — was likely absorbed from a social environment you didn't choose. The question isn't whether you're being influenced; you are. The question is whether you've ever deliberately audited the source.

Name one ambition you're currently pursuing — then trace it: who in your environment modeled it first, and would you still want it if they had never been present in your life?

Drawing from Psychoanalytic theory combined with mimetic theory (French literary criticism / anthropology) — René Girard