The first person to march to a different drummer

I've always been a fan of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."  It suggests an approach to life that I aspire to:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

A traveler down that road would undoubtedly be marching to her own drumbeat.  And as I recently discovered, that image comes to us, courtesy of the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.  I'm no authority on Thoreau, but from what I know of him, I'd have to guess that this quote from Walden probably expresses his quintessence:

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

So Sidharta!  I like an extended version of that passage, as well:

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?"

Food for thought in our Race to Nowhere culture.