Admiration can make a stranger’s ordinary habits look like instructions worth following.

Once you respect somebody, everything they do starts to look deliberate. Their sleep, their reading, the way they answer messages, all of it gets read as method rather than as circumstance and preference. Most of what any person does is neither chosen nor optimal, and their success may have very little to do with the habit you are copying. Admiration converts noise into advice.

Before adopting something because a person you admire does it, ask whether it would still make sense coming from a stranger. And where you copy anyway, give it a fixed trial rather than a permanent place.