Run the Point Highlight Series Presents: "Self Reliance"

Run the Point Highlight Series presents: "Self Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

This week I bring you The Run the Point Highlight Series. Run the Point Highlights are notes that I've literally highlighted with my marking pen while reading an article, essay or book. I share them with you in hopes that they move you as much as they moved me.

I start off with "Self Reliance" by Emerson. I was first introduced to Emerson while in college. I had one of those professors who made you enjoy a subject you previously had no interest in. Emerson and his transcendentalism movement was all about telling people to stop focusing on what someone else has done in the past and begin to recognize the greatest in the present movement.

Below are a few of the highlights I've taken from "Self Reliance." If you are interested in seeing all of the parts I've highlighted, send me an email to bruny@runthepoint.com, with the subject heading: Complete Self-Reliance Highlights.

Picture a textbook or any book for that matter. You read through it and you find yourself saying, "WOW" to certain words, sentences, concepts or paragraphs. You quickly highlight or underline that section. You can now go back and just read the highlighted sections. What I bring forth to you are the highlights that have moved me and I hope they have an impact on you as well. I've read tons of books, from the Bible, Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad; Poor Dad, Do You, Interviews with Millionaires, The Power Behind Positive Thinking, The Power of Focus, "Oh, the Places You will go", etc. They include valuable pieces of information that I have highlighted and made notes on.

Here are my highlights from "Self Reliance":

Trust Yourself

• 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.


• Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.


• Else's, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.


• There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.


• But God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.


• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.


• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Don't Imitate

• The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed.


• Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivations; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only and extemporaneous, half possession.


• Every man is unique.


• The Scipionsim of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Greatness

• You see great works--statues, buildings, machines, books and you feel belittled by them, put in your place, puny, unworthy. But you're looking at it all wrong. Their greatness awaits your judgment.


• Do not envy or feel inferior when you read of a great soul. So they were great. So what? Did they up greatness? No! your own actions have as much potential to affect the future if you would be exactly what you are--fully and truly.


• Why worship the past? The truth is here, now, as fully and completely as it has ever been. You need no ancient description of the color of the sky; you only need to look up. You can describe it however you want to describe it. Memorizing former descriptions misses the point entirely.


• We are not victims, we are creators.


• We have a tendency to make the mistake of measuring each other by what we have rather than by what we have become.It is ironic that we will travel thousands of miles to see great architecture rather than staying home and building our own great works--something the architects of these great foreign buildings obviously did.

Your Ambassador,
Mike Bruny, CPCC
Certified Life Coach, Speaker, Author
Run the Point Enterprises
www.runthepoint.com

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Author of: "Move the Crowd: 30 Days of Hip Hop Affirmations To Change Your Life." www.runthepoint.com/products