I kind of get it, but it feels off.
“Those giants are more intelligent than me. They are harder working than me. How can I reach their level as quickly as possible?”
Not by blindly copying everything I imagine, but I could be wrong.
Can't find the source of the quote but it was about the Chinese approach to learning.
Look to the master
Follow the master
Walk with the master
See through the master
Become the master
When the author says:
> Don’t try to be “creative” at this stage.
What he means by that is that if you try to configure emacs yourself, without yet being a master, half of the functionality you try to use will be broken, and you'll spend countless hours reading code and figuring out how to fix your broken setup. This is the traditional way to master emacs: by going back and forth between writing your own modifications and struggling to incorporate other people's code. Tackle every challenge head-on, and solve them one by one to make emacs do what you need. The daily effort to do turns you into an emacs master, like turning the wheel of pain turned the boy Conan into a 1970s bodybuilder.
I don't think that's a wise or attractive route for new emacs users today. Nowadays, everything I could do in emacs I can do with other freely available software as well, and I have to ask myself whether it makes more sense to invest the time figuring out how to do it in emacs, or to install an easier and more polished special-purpose tool. When my workflow revolved entirely around emacs, it made sense to make the extra effort. But over time my workflow fragmented, until the extra effort never made sense, and my emacs setup stopped growing.
Copying the setup of somebody who has already invest the time to get everything working together sounds like a nice compromise.