follow in someone's footsteps

Example: “She followed in her mother's footsteps and became a surgeon.”

Origin: Rests on something that is literally true before it is figurative. Walking in tracks another has already made is genuinely easier and safer — in deep snow, on a mountainside, or across uncertain ground, stepping into existing footprints saves effort and avoids hazards the person ahead has already found. The carol Good King Wenceslas, written in 1853, turns exactly this into its central image, with the page told to tread in his master's steps and finding the going warmer for it. The figurative sense is older, attested in English from the 1500s, and it retains the same double implication: the follower's path is made easier by the one who went first, and it is also, necessarily, not their own path.