Here’s a story that should make anyone who spends more than ten minutes getting ready in the morning feel a little uncomfortable. It’s a story from ancient China about a woman who looked at the most beautiful person in the world and decided to copy exactly what that beautiful person did. Not her clothing, not her jewelry, not her hairstyle — something far more subtle, far more personal, something that should have been beyond copying. The result was so disastrous that her name has been an insult for over two thousand years. Her legacy is being a cautionary tale, a byword for foolish imitation, a example of how trying too hard to be something you’re not can make everything worse.

The idiom is 东施效颦 — dōng shī xiào pín — which translates roughly to “Dongshi imitating Xishi’s frown.” Let that sink in for a moment. A woman’s name became a byword for foolish imitation. She’s not remembered for anything she did positively. She’s not remembered for her kindness, her intelligence, her accomplishments, her relationships. She’s remembered for failing to copy someone else, for trying to do something that was never going to work, for making herself ridiculous in the attempt. And the reason this story has survived so long, the reason it has echoed through Chinese culture for millennia, is that it illustrates something so fundamental about human nature that we keep making the same mistake, century after century, in ways both trivial and profound.