The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

February 18Speak What Tomorrow Thinks

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. You may as well concern yourself with your shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson—Self-Reliance (1841)

Self-reliance anchors a great deal of its potency in self-trust. Today's reading is a kick in the self-trust pants.

Although consistency is often heralded as a pillar of stability, self-reliance calls you to trust in your ideas enough to know when they are wrong. It requires the courage to change course even if you fear the disapproval of those who today approve.

Every innovation or remarkable breakthrough occurs because someone changed their mind and decided to approach something from a new point of view. All growth requires this form of change.

It does not mean that you must abandon your current beliefs, but it does mean you must trust yourself enough to contradict your previous perceptions when it becomes clear that you must “speak what tomorrow thinks.”

Early on in Self-Reliance, Emerson writes, “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”

It is through the disregard for what others might think that you can gain the independence of thought that ...