Emerson on self-trust
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
🏛️ Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay is a sermon with one text: trust yourself. Its best argument comes at the start. We recognise our own discarded thoughts in the work of people we admire, and they come back to us with a borrowed majesty. Someone else said, with confidence, what we had thought and set aside because it was only ours. The lesson he draws is to hold to the private conviction, even against the room.
From there he attacks everything that pulls a person off that centre. Conformity: society is in league against the independence of each of its members and pays for compliance in comfort. Consistency: fear of contradicting what you said yesterday, which keeps you loyal to a past self for the sake of appearances. He says to speak today's thought in hard words and tomorrow's likewise, and to accept being misunderstood. Imitation, envy, and dependence on travel, property, institutions or the good opinion of others, all treated as forms of the same leaning.
His claim is that nothing can bring you peace but yourself, and that a person who stands on their own judgement is worth more to others than one who mirrors them.
✨KEY IDEAS
We meet our own rejected thoughts in great work, and they shame us for not having trusted them.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
To be great is to be misunderstood, he says, and lists the misunderstood.
Envy is ignorance and imitation is a kind of self-destruction.
He would refuse a claim on his charity from people who are not his own.
📝READING NOTES
Public domain. One sentence quoted. The rest is paraphrase. Read on 5 and 6 September, while drafting the promotion case.
Why I read it then
📂 Promotion case for Group Product Manager is a document in which I have to say, in plain sentences, that I am good at something. Three drafts in, every claim had a qualifier and a co-author. I wanted a dose of someone with no such difficulty.
What I take
- The first paragraph, whole. Trusting a thought because it is mine is not arrogance. It is the only way the thought gets tested.
- Consistency, read correctly. He does not say consistency is foolish. He says a foolish one is: holding a position because I once held it in public. I changed my mind about the launch date in February and it was the best decision of the quarter.
- Do your own work. The case got shorter after this. I cut the sentences that existed to pre-empt objections.
What I leave
- The self-made fiction. He writes as if a person could stand entirely on their own centre. I live in a tenement where the woman downstairs has my key and feeds my cat. Dad named every crane on the quay to me before I could read. Nobody arrives at a self alone, and a self-reliance that forgets this is ingratitude with good prose.
- The contempt. For the crowd, for charity, for anyone who asks him for something. He admits to giving the occasional dollar and being ashamed of it. I find that passage ugly, and I think he half means it to be.
- Half magnificent, half exhausting. Every sentence is pitched as the last word. By the middle I wanted one ordinary clause.
The knot
Here is what took me a week. On one reading, self-reliance means never needing anything from anyone, and so never asking. That was my reading for most of my working life, and it is why I waited to be offered a role and did not request it. But asking for the role in July was the more self-trusting act: it stated my own estimate of myself out loud and let the room disagree. Leaning on no one and saying what you think you are worth are different things, and Emerson, to be fair, is for the second.
That became half of 💎 Dignity is not the same as never asking for anything. The other half is a butler: 📖 Ishiguro on dignity and wasted devotion.
Quote note: 💬 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin.
Questions it left me with
- How do I tell a conviction from a mood? He offers no test. Writing it down and reading it a week later is the only one I have.
- Where is the line between self-trust and not listening? Katarina's first feedback stung and was right.
- What do I owe the people who made the self I am being told to rely on?
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
- Emerson argues that : a person should trust their own judgement above custom, reputation and their own past statements
- by stating that : our best thoughts are the ones we dismiss as merely ours, that society rewards conformity and a false consistency, and that nothing outside a person can supply what their own conviction does