PNTV: Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self Reliance. Technically, this is not a book per se. It's one of the greatest essays ever. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American philosopher who integrated the east and the west, transcendental philosophy, etc. Wrote this essay in 1841. Now I happen to love Seth Godin's Domino Projects version of this essay in a little book with some commentaries by some great modern luminaries, but you can find it online for free. Just search Self Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson. I consider this a must read. 1841 again is when Emerson wrote this, but it's as applicable today as it was then. You got to navigate through some 19th century prose, but it is well worth it. Find it, print it out, find a quiet spot, read it and live it. Self Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fun fact. I actually created this note earlier this year on January 4, 2018, which happened to be almost exactly 10 years after I had the idea to create philosopher's notes. January 2, 2008, I was on a flight from Tokyo back to LA after a pre honeymoon trip with Alexandra. I opened up a sky mall to a two page ad for some company that did business summaries, right, summaries of business books. And I had this choir of angels moment of somebody should be doing this for self help. Self Development Books. And then I realized, you know what? I'll be that someone almost exactly 10 years to the date that I created this note. Kind of found it fitting to do a note on Ralph Waldo Emerson to commemorate that 10 year anniversary. Long Prelude One more point. We named our son Emerson after Ralph Waldo Emerson. And it's very funny. He's now six years old. We've had a, you know, I've got a painting, a portrait I had commissioned of Ralph Waldo Emerson looking at me in my office every day. We've got a cover of his book turned out with a beautiful picture of Emerson, so he knows him as Ralph. And we often talk about different things that Ralph wrote and taught, including all life is an experiment. The more the better. We use that a lot in the Johnson household. Anyway, philosopher's note, bunch of my favorite big ideas. We've got five of them here. Self Reliance. What does that start with? Well, it starts with trusting ourselves. As Emerson says, trust thyself. Every heart, he says, vibrates to that iron string. Trust thyself. The world is in A conspiracy, he says, to make you conform, to make you do what it wants you to do. And you have to have Herculean heroic. He says, godlike trust in yourself to actually show up and live a life of integrity. Right. And just jumping ahead already. Nonconformity, he says you need to be a nonconformist. He says whosoever would be a man or a woman if he was writing today, whosoever would be the best version of themselves must be a non conformist. Why is that? Well, if you haven't noticed, the normal behavior in our world is a little off. You might have noticed, right? But it's easy to get caught up in that poll. And in 1841 it was the same deal, almost contemporary of Emerson, Mark Twain, somewhere around the same time, put it this way, he said, anytime I find myself on the side of the majority, I pause and reflect. He was obviously being funny about it. But anytime you find yourself on the majority, you might want to pause and reflect. When the majority of people are overweight, obese, unhealthy, psychologically unstable, looking at their iPhones, it's something like 3 billion billions of times a day Americans check their phones, their smartphones, whether it's iPhone or Android. That's crazy. You know, I live in Ojai, California, and down the street, not too far from our house, a guy named Krishnamurti taught not too long ago, and he said it is no measure of well being or health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. It's no measure of your health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Right. And again, he said that decades ago, our society is even more sick today, literally, physically and emotionally, psychologically than ever before. Now Emerson tells us, again, you need to be a non conformist. You need to be willing to step outside of what everyone else is doing and trust thyself as a taskmaster. He says it takes godlike courage to do that. Why? Because the moment you do that, he says, and again, 1841, he says, society will whip you with its displeasure. You make people uncomfortable when you do things like turn off your phone early in the evening and get up and meditate and eat healthily and not doing all the things that everybody else are doing, right, that requires a level of courage that's going to result in a level of whipping. But we need to have that level of courage in order to express ourselves most fully. Again, Self Reliance, 101. Next idea is hobgoblins. He says foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of Small minds, right? So a hobgoblin of small minds to just look at your past and say, well, I said that in the past and I used to do that and I got to maintain consistency to who I was. He says that's not a good idea. That is a great way to make sure that you aren't bringing your attention to the present moment. He says, you want to have a thousand eyed present moment. You want to bring all of your attention to this moment. What do you feel in this moment? What's most authentic for you right now? Now you don't want to have a foolish consistency to the past. You want to be willing to let go of who you were, what you said was important to you. He says you don't want to drag the corpse of your memory with you. That's not a very productive thing. Today we'd say you don't want to drive looking in the rear view mirror. You want to look forward. Greatness, he says, appeals to the future. Now we want to put an asterisk on that and make sure we qualify it with foolish consistency. Right. Consistency is actually an important thing. You just want to be aware of being foolish in your consistency where you're continuing to do something that no longer resonates with you. You know it's not true yet you're going through the motions to because you're uncomfortable stepping out of that trend. That's when you have some issues. That's a foolish consistency. And it's funny because once years ago, 10, 12, what was it, 12, 13 years ago, maybe now I had raised money. What did I raise? I don't know, $3 million or something for my last business. One of our investors happened to be a billionaire and we were talking about a pivot we needed to make in our business. And this wasn't working quite the way we wanted. We needed to shift. We right. And he fully supported it. And he literally quoted from memory the entire passage we're talking about right now. This is a billionaire created a ton of value in the world. And this was a passage he felt was so important, entrepreneurially and otherwise, that he committed it to memory and recited it to me in our discussion about our need to make a change in what we were doing. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. You need to be willing to break through and make a new decision and take a new direction. He says Emerson does speak today what you believe in hard words and speak tomorrow what you believe in hard words, even if it contradicts everything you said today. Imagine that you speak today with authority and commitment and conviction, and then tomorrow you've realized you've learned, you've gained a new perspective. And then you speak what you believe that day, even if it contradicts everything you said today with a level of conviction and again, a level of grounded humility. And you realize you're always spiraling up to a new level of awareness. You let go of the dogma, etc. But it's an important thing to think about. The fourth idea here is zigs and zags and angels. Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us, if you look at a ship, right, that's going from his time, it was like Boston or New York to London, right? The ship doesn't go like that. It doesn't go in one straight shot, oh, I decided to set sail and boom, went on a straight course. He says, no, no, you. You'll notice that there's a hundred zigs and zags and tacks, but if you step back and you look at it from a broad enough perspective, you'll see that it actually straightens itself out into a straight line. And he says, your life is like that. Your life will zig and it will zag. But we need you to be in integrity with who you are, right, Such that you're finding a truer and truer course. But if you're just doing what you think you should do and trying to conform, then we're not going to figure out who you are. And he says, the people we admire the most are the ones who have committed to living a virtuous life. They're willing to zig and to zag and to discover their own truth. But then moment to moment to moment, they do their best. And at some point, he says the force of their character is cumulative, which we talk about all the time in our optimized plus one series. I say, you make these tiny little plus one, plus one, plus one changes, right? You zig and you zag, you get a little bit better. And those little micro incremental optimizations, you aggregate and compound those over an extended period of time, and you get phenomenal results. And he uses a metaphor that's astounding. He says individuals that do that, who show up at the level of character and virtue consistently, it's as if they're escorted. They have an escort of angels behind them. You can just feel something in their integrity, in their character that just emits virtue. And it's as if they have angels escorting them, which is the result of the force of Their character cumulatively growing in strength and power. We want that. Which leads us to our fifth big idea, the royal you. Emerson shares a. Anytime I say Emerson now, I got to think of my son. Ralph Waldo says that there's a common fable, right? He was talking about in his time of a sot, right? Who's drunk, right? And they pass out, and they're picked up from the gutter or wherever they passed out, and they're brought into a duke's palace and they're put in the duke's bed and they're made up and they're cleaned up, and when they wake up and everyone tells him, oh, you must have been insane, you think you're who. No, you're a duke. And they treat them with all the ceremony and all the different things that go into that duke's life, and they convince him that, no, you were insane and now you've woken up. And he says that we all love that metaphor because it's who we are. Every once in a while, he says, we wake up and we think rationally about our divine potential and the fact that we are true princes and princesses in the most royal, highest, best, divine sense, right? And that we need to live like that and we need to act like that. And the way you do that is by trusting yourself because you have that divine knowing at your core, right? The whole idea. Emerson also said that no great thing was ever done without enthusiasm, right? And again, as we discussed a number of times, enthusiasm comes from two little Greek words, en plus theos, God within. The divine is within us. We just need to wake up to that, trust it, express it, do the things such that we experience its flow more and more consistently and act like that best version of ourselves. We, moment to moment to moment, we'll zig and we'll zag, but over time, we'll find angels escorting us throughout our lives. We don't want to be hobgoblins. Foolish consistency. We want to have wise consistency. You want to show up and you want to work your protocol, right? You want to know what you do when you're feeling best. You want to program yourself with those algorithms we talked about in Optimizing Algorithms 101, right? What algorithms are you writing for your life? You want consistency on that, and then that gives you the courage and the confidence and the groundedness to be willing to zig and zag and to be willing to be inconsistent when that's the wise course. So remember that. And then we've got nonconformity whosoever would be a man or a woman at their most actualized self must be a non conformist. It is no measure of your health to be well adjusted to to our current society. Be willing to non conform. Have the courage to deal with societies and your families and perhaps some of your friends displeasure as you elevate your standards. Live like the royal you and trust thyself, remembering that every heart vibrates to that iron string. There you go. Quick look at one of my heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self Reliance As I said, I love the Domino Project, Seth Godin's version of this and you can find this essay online. I consider it a must read. I don't know how many times I've read it, but it's a lot. Once or twice a year I'll unpack it again. There you go again. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to your self reliance. Here's to you trusting yourself and here's to you having another awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.