The chapter begins with two images of a person trying to do better than their own body allows. Standing on tiptoe, nobody stands steady. Taking long strides, nobody walks far.
Both are exact and both are testable, which is unusual in a book that mostly argues by paradox. Tiptoe adds height and removes balance. A stride longer than your natural one covers more ground per step and exhausts you sooner. In each case the gain is real, immediate and visible, and the cost is deferred and invisible until it arrives. That is the shape of every failure the chapter goes on to list.
The four clauses that follow are the negative form of the four in chapter twenty-two: showing yourself, thinking yourself right, boasting, taking pride. Set beside the two opening images, they are recast as the same kind of error. Self-display is standing on tiptoe. It raises you now and it cannot be sustained, and the person who does it is less visible over any period that matters, not more.
The chapter is one of the book's plainest, and it is worth noticing that it contains no mention of the way until its final sentence, no cosmology and no paradox that needs unpicking. What it offers is a physical analogy carried through to a conclusion about conduct, and it works whether or not the reader accepts anything else in the text.