If you try to be something you are not or strive for something completely beyond your present capacities, you end up as a pathetic dabbler, trying first to be a wise person, then a bureaucrat, then a politician, then a civic leader.
If France has a law against insulting bureaucrats (it does) and you insult a French bureaucrat on the web then you have, at least arguably, just committed a crime in France.
On returning to St Petersburg in 1990, Mr Putin spent a year as a university bureaucrat, then moved into city government, trying to woo foreign investors.
"Japanese lawyers will call abureaucrat and ask if something is allowed then give legal advice based on that, " notes Stephen Roith at Clifford Chance, another foreign law office in Japan.