I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

Rollins frames identity as an active, ongoing project rather than a fixed inheritance. “Reinvention” suggests repeated self-editing—rejecting the default scripts supplied by family and peer groups (“parents,” “friends”) in order to arrive at a self that is chosen rather than merely received. The final image, “to cut yourself out of stone,” evokes sculpture: selfhood is made through effort, discipline, and sometimes painful subtraction. The quote’s urgency fits Rollins’s broader public persona—hard-edged, self-reliant, and skeptical of complacency—casting authenticity not as self-expression alone but as self-construction through will and work.