How Emerson Can Change Your Life

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3:05Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

3:45Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm writing about Emerson right now. And it's funny, I was going through my books on Emerson and I've got my portable Emerson, I've got my Penguin Classics translation of nature. And then I found this book I had that I forgot that I'd read. Emerson has this little collection of biographies called Representative Men. And it's funny, I saw a little sticker on there and I said, oh, that's where I bought this book. I bought this book in Australia at a little bookstore near Bondi Beach, which is funny because I'm going to be in Australia this summer.

4:24I'm doing a talk the last day of July, I believe, and then the first day of August. You can grab tickets to that at ryanholiday.net slash Australia. I'll link to it in today's show notes. But that's not really what today's episode is about because it's actually about Emerson, one of my favorite people to write about and the subject of a really great new biography called Lessons from an American Stoic, how Emerson can change your life. The author Mark Matusik actually came out and did the Daily Stoic podcast a couple of weeks ago. That episode is going to run in a little bit, but I wanted to bring you an excerpt from that book because I liked it so much.

5:08His publisher, Harper Collins, was nice enough to let us run this excerpt from the audio book on the Daily Stoic podcast. So you get a sense of what that audio book is like. The book in physical form is great too. We've got some signed copies in the painted porch. And there's just something about Emerson. He was Stoic, But he really was a man who owed his allegiance to no one particular school, his famous line about how consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. He took and borrowed and adapted and absorbed everything he could get his hands on. And that's why he makes for such a delightful thinker, one of the great American philosophers, writers.

5:53I'm talking about him actually in the Justice book also. He has one of the great coaching trees in all of American history. The writers that he nurtured, that he supported, that he helped bring to the public consciousness, also incredibly impressive. And so I really enjoyed this book. Mark Matusik did an awesome job, and that's why I wanted to bring you this excerpt. So here is a chunk from Lessons from an American Stoic, how Emerson can change your life. And he really can change your life. So check out the book and listen to today's episode.

6:45Becoming Yourself Waldo was a lackluster, socially awkward child of whom little was expected in a family of confident overachievers, as I've said. Passive, dreamy, and prone to mood swings, he saw himself as an unfocused laggard and despaired of ever amounting to much. He was always listening, according to biographer Van Wick Brooks, and was an obscure little boy, chubby, awkward, affectionate as a puppy, with a sluggish mind, a mind heavy and overcast like a summer of charged electricity, a shrinking, retreating little creature, but full of wonder. Waldo loved his books, worshipped his brothers, and had dreams of greatness, but was also tormented by doubt and self-judgment.

7:41His composure around others masked a passionate temperament, extreme emotions, and a fair amount of social anxiety. I ramble among doubts to which my reason offers no solution, he wrote in a letter to his aunt Mary. A Dickensian figure notorious for her brilliance and oddities, unmarried Mary Moody Emerson was Waldo's first mentor and influencer, the personification of originality in the eyes of her timid nephew. At four feet three inches tall, Mary was a fiery Calvinist and autodidact who read Cicero and Shakespeare for breakfast, wore a burial shroud when she traveled, and slept in a coffin-shaped bed, so eager was she to return to her Maker.

8:31Mary moved through the world with a prehensile energy that Waldo admired. She had the misfortune of spinning with greater velocity than any of the other tops, he wrote, though he deemed himself sluggish, distracted, and moody. Mary encouraged her introverted nephew to throw off his shell, test his limits, and set his sights on the highest goals. Scorn trifles, lift your aims, and do what you are afraid to do, she told him. Waldo learned that becoming oneself, striving for an original relation to the universe, is the purpose of a human life. He came to believe that character is everything, personally and spiritually, and that unless an individual knows herself, she cannot fulfill her unique purpose in life.

9:23This purpose transcends convention and utility. It is not the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but that he should explore himself, he maintained. Looking to others for approval is futile when it comes to developing personal character. Instead, we must look to ourselves for guidance, since there comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide. One's mandate is to bring what is hers into the world and harvest the fruits of her natural being. This is only possible when she becomes deeply acquainted with herself as she truly is, outside the spotlight of public opinion.

10:18Waldo viewed self-inquiry as an unsurpassed method for personal growth. The practice of exploring philosophical questions to open the mind and gain insight into the nature of reality dates back to a time long before the Stoics, when the sages of India first posed the question, Who am I? as the starting point on the path of self-discovery. Socrates carried on this practice with the admonition to know thyself as a doorway to the examined life. We create our perceived reality through the funhouse mirror of personal bias, which is why self-inquiry is necessary for self-reliance. It's impossible to do your own thing without first knowing who you are.

11:09This means doing the humbling work of examining parts of yourself you'd prefer to ignore in order to integrate them into your awareness. Waldo learned from watching Aunt Mary that while this difficult woman could be off-putting, it was precisely Mary's willingness to be who she was and allow her faults to be what they were that brought such force and effectiveness to her character. Mary did not waste time in a struggle to conform, while her nephew was an insecure people-pleaser. Fortunately, Waldo would outgrow much of his self-tormenting behavior and make peace with his peculiarities. He would come to see his debilities and defects as teachers, as inherent, necessary aspects of his character.

11:58Over time, he came to develop the ability to survey his inner landscape through the eyes of an objective witness, to view his shortcomings not with tragic regret, but as the comic failures of a limited person.

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13:08Follow the Bliss Increasing your awareness of the voice inside you allows you to trust your own predilections. None of us ever will accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to the whisper which is heard by him alone. Waldo's emphasis on intuition over tuition, on adhesion to our inborn knowledge more than erudition picked up in books, is integral to self-reliance. Intuitive graspings open your mind to messages from its higher intelligence. That which each man can do best, none but his maker can teach him. Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberations and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

14:04Spontaneous action circumvents the self-doubting mind. When we trust this inner dictation, we prosper. Studies of intuition support Waldo's teaching. Intuition is defined as the ability to know something without analytic reasoning and bridges the gap between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. Efficacy and authenticity are deeply linked to intuition as well. Satu Terikangas, a Finnish researcher who specializes in the dynamics of strategic change, points out that intuition is prompted when we travel from known to unknown cognitive terrain By rejecting second-hand ideas and assumptions, we bring about a cognitive shift that forces everyday habitual masks down, inviting the authentic self to emerge, Terikangas explains.

15:01This assertion echoes Waldo's view of personal genius, the originality that is your natural birthright. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius, he tells us. Faithful listening to the still small voice within enlarges and defines your creative power. It seems to be true that the more exclusively idiosyncratic a man is, the more infinite, Waldo noted. Females have a distinct advantage over boys and men, apparently, when it comes to intuition. The female corpus callosum, white matter that links the brain's right and left hemispheres, is thicker than its male counterparts.

15:51This advantage allows women and girls to access both cerebral hemispheres with greater facility. They're able to integrate emotions and gut feelings into rational decision-making with greater ease. I, as always, venerate the oracular nature of woman, Emerson wrote in his journal. Males tend to be more compartmentalized in their thinking and less flexible in moving from logic to intuition and more integrated forms of knowledge. Judith Orloff, a psychologist who specializes in treating empaths and sensitive people, deems intuition the female superpower, citing the case of a woman she worked with who discovered her suppressed intuition in the nick of time.

16:38Faced with a hard professional decision, this female CEO was having a difficult time thinking the problem through to a logical solution. Rather than force this momentous decision, she was advised by Orloff to ask herself in a quiet moment, is this the best deal for me to get involved with? This turn inward relaxed her cogitating, logic-seeking mind and gave this high-octane overachiever the answer for which she'd been waiting. Orloff describes how this patient saw a flash of the Titanic sinking, which told the CEO all she needed to know about which option to take. Using this image and her gut feeling led her to opt out.

17:23That business turned out to be a failure. When Mary Moody Emerson was asked how she managed to walk her own path in a society in which women were second-class citizens, she replied, In an interview about his own creative process, Andy Warhol confided, When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. The more you have to decide and choose, the more wrong it gets. Waldo is adamant in his belief that we know better than we do, and that genius is more reliable than ratiocination. We need only obey, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Into us flows the stream evermore of thought from we know not whence.

18:13We do not determine what we think. We only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the facts, and let God think through us. Following this divine inclination leads a person to her bliss. The exhausting struggle to make things happen is also alleviated, as Waldo learned after years of self-doubt. Can you believe, Waldo Emerson, that you may relieve yourself of this perpetual perplexity of choosing? and by putting your ear close to the soul, learn always the true way. He marveled in his journal. Such listening arouses our primordial intelligence, and its messages are often a revelation.

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