'becoming oneself"

I remember recalling reading a book by Shunryu Suzuki, Not Necessarily So, I believe, where he talks about a time when someone expressed a sense of failure in achieving enlightenment. Suzuki  replied to this practitioner that the function of practice is not necessarily to become something great, but rather to become oneself. I am puzzled by this statement 'becoming oneself', and I think that it's quite a precarious balance, much more than what is often described in self-help books. What I can understand from it is that becoming oneself seems to require a combination of cultivation and using that cultivation to illuminate one's nature, rather than trying to cover it up.
    An example, I think, would be the case of going to university . When I was an undergraduate at York, I have to say there were a lot of subconscious fantasies  in my mind about what I expected to be or wanted to be. And quite often, I would let these possibilities run wild within me without rationally exploring them or measuring them up to actions and experiences. It's  one thing for sure to have a lot of ideas running around in mind, but it's quite a different thing to put those ideas to use and give them form and structure. I would have to say that at that stage of life, I had a lot  of unharnessed desires and ambitions, much of which ended up not  being so real. When I started to work for a company, things changed in me, and I begun to realize that I am not an isolated individual who is just serving myself. Instead, I had to find a way to adapt myself to the needs of a large and diverse group of people, as well as serve a large customer base. That is when I started to put aside the wild notions about becoming this or that, writing this or that book, or doing something 'beyond my wildest fantasy'. Of course, I often went in the opposite direction of letting my life become too subsumed in work, but this contrast allowed me to be a bit more grounded in my wishes. I even begun to ask myself whether the thoughts I am entertaining have real value or are just fancies that come and go.
     Where does the topic of 'becoming oneself' fall into this? I think that becoming oneself requires cultivation:  an immersion in other people's thoughts, books, teachers and work. If I don't nurture myself on the teachings of others, my own nature is kind of like uncooked rice. It is sort of raw and not exactly edible. But when I add the challenge of being with others and accommodating new viewpoints to my being, something does change, and I begin to work with the material that's in me. I start to learn that I am not so patient or thoughtful as I had imagined  in certain areas, and that there are many parts of me that are very rough at this point. But as long as I am not mistaking this cultivation to be an absolute goal, I can use it to  illuminate or see into how I am relating to others. This model of looking at self seems to fly in the face  of another, more romantic view, which suggests that we know the self by 'turning inward' to view the contents of one's subconscious. Though I don't think this latter view is as fashionable as it used to be, I think it's still dominating a lot of areas including the model of what artists and writers do. And it can be misleading in the sense  that we  often don't know  what we are capable of embodying unless there is  a real context to work with that is outside the body and emotions.