I agree that "just be yourself" isn't the most helpful advice, but this isn't what it means – the idea is that you should do what you want to do rather than acting like you think people want you to. That's not the same thing as refusing to think or consider that you might be wrong.A man who knows himself is someone who is dead certain of what he wants and makes all his choices – about career, mate, income level, spirituality, politics – with a view to acquiring it. A man who knows himself is one who cannot entertain the idea that he might be wrong, or that there may be two or more viable ways of interpreting an issue or solving a problem. A man who knows himself projects that arrogance into his judgement of others, and formulates opinions about them that are almost inescapably ill-founded and unshakable. In the life and ideas of a man who knows himself (or even thinks he knows himself), there is no room for the whimsy, ambivalence, doubt, nuance, curiosity and inquisitiveness upon which all creative thought is based.
That characterization of "a man who knows himself" rings false to my ears. It describes someone with unexamined self-confidence, not someone who truly has self-knowledge. The deeper you go into trying to know yourself, the more you realize that it's hard to pin down the object of that knowledge, and hard to distinguish the self you're supposed to know from the world, or life. You'll start to become more aware of your inseparability from the others on whom you depend, and of just how fluid your own nature can be and how it slips free from your grasp each time you convince yourself you've got it. For a while at least, uncertainty increases with self-knowledge. Thus true self knowledge is more an ongoing practice than a project that gets completed, and a project that encourages humility and empathy more than the kind of clueless arrogance described here.
Exactly. I also can't help but notice that despite the fact that the rest of the article is about her daughters or a generic "she"/"herself", this suddenly talks about a man, and is filled with stereotypically male traits.