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Today I'd like to talk to you about how to journal like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now, this is something I've been discussing for the past several weeks. And today I'm going to wrap this series up for you and talk about one, how to think through your journals. Two, how he indexed his journals to find the good stuff in them. And then three, we're going to talk about an essay he wrote called Self Reliance. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Readable Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and I'm so, so, so happy that you're here. This has been a fun podcast to make over the years. I really love talking about reading and writing and thinking and just a call to action to slow down, right, to hit pause on your day and think about something that matters you and to find a book that matters to that topic and spend some real quality time with it. I actually just filmed a a new video today on my YouTube channel. I haven't edited it yet, but the main topic is, is it possible to actually read great literature in the space of just 10 minutes a day? Because, you know, we're all so busy and I got to thinking that we used to always carry books around with us. And I know you probably still do if you're listening to this podcast. You're one of those people, you're like me, you always have a book. But a long time ago, that was the only option. We did not have phones to carry around. If you're old enough, like, to remember when cell phones became a thing, you know, we instantly became fascinated with them. They were the sort of the way to connect to humanity. And it was a bit of a shame because we put our books down and put our phones into our pockets and walked with those instead. And my argument in this YouTube video was that if phones didn't exist, obviously you'd be reading more. And so if you just carry your book with you, then when you find a nice park bench or when you're waiting in line, if you can train yourself to pull out the book rather than the phone, it'll be just like it was in 1980, and you'll read lots of great books. Okay, let's get into Emerson here. So, you know, this is an interesting man, he, he was really focused on trying to get the most out of his journals and his thinking. And one of the things I like about him is that he, he wasn't sort of satisfied with just putting information into journals. He had a very sort of strict habit of writing in them. He loved them, he carried them with him everywhere. But his problem as he began to realize filled up, was how on earth am I going to find all this stuff? Now, last week I talked about the John Locke indexing method. This was a method of indexing that was really popular back then. John Locke was a physician and a philosopher and had this really oddball system. And I call it oddball because it was challenging to do and today it's even complicated. But it was a way of sort of, you know, capturing a keyword on a page using the first letter of that word followed by the vowel that comes after that first letter, and then using that combination of letters to index it into. Anyway, it's complicated, right? And Emerson started down this path and he did not like it. I tried it. I did not like it. Perhaps you tried it. I don't know if you liked it or not. I would love to hear from you. You can always email me@eddie thereadwellpodcast.com and let me know what you thought. But Emerson focused on his journals and thought, well, what can I do that is actually sustainable and easy to do? And he faced two bigger questions. The first was, should I having journals that are just topic specific? He really liked poetry, he liked nature, he liked, you know, philosophy, of course. And he did keep specific journals for those topics. Journals that he knew he would be putting a lot of study into. But he also kept just a journal with him that was more of the stream of consciousness journal where he could write about anything. I think this is a good practice. I think we get caught up in what journals should be used for and it feels like maybe we're ruining a journal if we let get all of the things into the pages. So if I, if I have a journal where I'm writing philosophy ideas and then I'm writing my grocery list and then I'm writing about, you know, my parent teacher conference with my kid, and then I'm writing about a book that I just read, it feels like I'm sort of polluting the good ideas with the daily muck of life ideas. Right. Emerson would probably push against that and I would push against that too. You see, the more constraint mentally and emotionally we put onto our journals, the harder they are to use. And so if you walk around thinking, boy, I would love to use journals, I'd love to get back to that paper, feel and be able to get my thoughts on paper. But honestly, I just, I feel like they can't mix with these other ideas. And so I'm just going to put the notes in my phone, you know, I'll just, I'll do that. Or if you make your system so complex like John Locke did, then you're going to turn to your journals and think, ugh, I just don't have the emotional energy or time to journal, so I'll do it tomorrow. What we need, folks, is a simple journaling system that lets you be free, right? You need to feel like you can go into these journals, be yourself, find yourself, and develop your best ideas. And so Emerson embraced the idea that he had topic specific journals, but then he had this stream of conscious journal where he could just let the ideas flow and it didn't matter what they were. He would start at the top of the page and just write whatever came to him. If he was thinking about philosophy, then he would write about that. If he needed to do some pruning in his orchard, he, he loved trees. He was not good. He was not good with them, but he really liked trees. And so if he was learning about gardening or what have you, he would maybe, perhaps then he would draw a line under the philosophy stuff and then start writing about gardening. Now that might give you a little bit of a, a complex. Maybe you're the kind of person that really likes things organized. And the idea of having philosophy stuff on the same page as gardening things might make your eye twitch a little bit. I know it did mine at first, and I say at first because there is a solution and I really like this solution. This is what Emerson. And it's helped me quite a bit, and I hope it helps you. He would let himself be free on the page. He would write whatever came to his mind. And then at the end of the journal, when he was all done and had filled it up or at the end of the writing day, he would go back and he would read that page and he would say, okay, what is this page about? And he would see that there are several topics that are being addressed on this page, from philosophy to gardening to shopping. Right. Maybe we had to go get some milk at the store. What he would do is at the top header of the page, he would just put bullet points of what the page page contains. So you would do a bullet point for philosophy, one for gardening, one for shopping, and so on. Now, this is nice because you can quickly look at each page, go to the top, and look at the bullet points, and see what is on this page. And you'll know your future self will know whether this is a page worth reading or not. Now, if you do this across all of your pages, you can quickly scan through all of your pages and see at a quick glance what each page is about. But it gets better, because what he did is at the end of the notebook. Well, he would call them journals. He'd leave a blank page or at least on the back cover of that journal. And then what he would do is he would aggregate all of those bullet points into an index on the back of the book. So the way that I like to do this is once I have all of my topics listed at the top of the page, I'll open up Excel, and what I'll do is I'll write gardening. And now, this should be pointed out. Your journal must have page numbers. It absolutely has to have page numbers. And most of them are, oddly enough, don't. So you'll have to go in and handwrite page numbers in the bottom corner or however you do it. But when you open up Excel, what I would do is I would write gardening, and then I would write page four, and then I would just do that with each of my topics. Philosophy, page 7. Gardening, page 12. Philosophy, page 96. Right. Shopping, page 104. And you just put this into Excel in a big, giant list. Okay. And then what you do is you sort that list by the topic so that all of the gardening entries show up together. They're all lump. All of the philosophy entries are lumped together. And once you have that. And the nice thing is, is Excel will not only lump them together, but it does it alphabetically, which is really great. So it puts all of your gardening entries ahead of all of your philosophy entries and so on. And then you can go to the back of your journal, and you can just write in gardening, like you would see at the end of any nonfiction book with an index, you would write gardening, and then all of the pages where gardening can be found. So it would maybe say, gardening 1248, comma, and 106. So that when you come back to this notebook, you can go to the back page, look at your index, and see, oh, I thought about gardening in this notebook, and that's on page 1248 and whatever page I just said. 106. Okay. So that's Emerson's indexing method with a little bit of Excel, sort of pumped into it to make things easier for you. That's how I like to do it. And it's just wonderful when you have a full notebook sitting on your shelf and it's indexed with all of your thoughts. Now you can go back and you can find the thoughts that really matter. And this is great because you can have multiple topics for a specific passage. So let's say you have a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that you really like, and you've written that in your notebook. If that's the case, then perhaps at the top of that page you would write quotes as a topic because perhaps you like to track your quotes. You could also have a bullet point for Ralph Waldo Emerson, and perhaps the book or the quote itself is about writing. So you could also have a bullet point about writing. All three of those topics pertain to that quote, and they would end up in your index. So anytime you want to learn about Ralph Waldo Emerson, anytime you need a really great quote, or anytime you want to spiffy up your writing skills, you would see those options in your index, and they would all bring you back to this quote. And you'd be like, oh, right, this is a really great quote. And you would be able to use it to inspire your work. So that's the indexing method. And now what I'd like to do is talk about how he used these journals to think better and how he. Because Emerson primarily read in order to fuel his writing, he was a thinker, he was a public speaker. He actually began his career as a minister. He was given a congregation to look after, and he was mainly researching and reading to fuel his sermons. He did move away from the church later on in life, and he became mostly an academic and a writer and a poet and so on. But in those moments and in his latter moments, it was always about getting good thought on paper so that he could go out into the world and share those thoughts. He was a very busy speaker his whole life. He spoke all over the country. He was booked out like crazy. And mainly because he was so good at getting his thoughts into paper and then sharing them. One of his most famous essays is an essay called Self Reliance. We read this in my book club last week and we had a blast with this thing. I've read this four times now, and I thought I might cheat. I was going to just go to my old notes and, like, you know, turn to those. And because I'm always responsible in our live book club meetings for sort of leading the conversation, so I always bring up notes to Each meeting and we talk about the notes and push them back and forth. And we usually get quite a lot out of whatever piece we're reading. And I thought, I'm just going to cheat. I'm just going to get my notes from previous reading sessions so that I can have a week to focus on this building I'm trying to buy to turn into a bookstore. I've been very busy trying to buy this commercial space in Bountiful, Utah, so that one day our community can have a real bookstore to go to. But I thought, you know what? That is not what we do here. I really wanted to read it again. So with all of the members of the book club, which by the way, there are 140 members in our book club and you should join if you haven't yet done so, go to thereadwellpodcast.com and then up in the header you can see the title book club and our navigation. You can read all about it. You can see that it, you know, what books we're reading and when and so on. We'd love to have you there. But I thought, you know what? I'm going to read this again. So I printed it off and read that, read it with them. And I read slowly. I took notes and I applied the ideas. It's a 21 page essay as we printed it. In some books it can be about 25 to 26 pages. But I began to go through this and it took me about two hours a day over the course of the entire week. So I put a good 14 hours of study into this essay and I loved every word of it. Every freaking word of it. It's so, so good. But what I wanted to do today, I pulled out five sentences that I thought pertained to journaling because again, we've been talking about journaling and this will be my last episode on this topic. Starting next week, we will have new thoughts and new books to discuss. But I wanted to wrap up with Emerson's essay here and pull out these five lines because I think they will help you embrace your journal a little bit more. The first line is, speak your latent conviction. Now this is right in the first paragraph or so of the essay. And another thing I do when I'm taking notes is anytime I come to a word on a page I don't fully understand the definition of, I'll circle that word and then I'll put a number at the top of that word in the top right hand corner. If this is the first word I've circled on the page, I'll put a little one next to it and circle the one. Then I'll have all of these words throughout the page that I don't, you know, that I had to look up in the definition. So I might have three or four words circled, all labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4. And then down at the bottom of the page where I've got a bunch of footer space there, I'll list out the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. I'll write the words respectively, and then I'll write out their definitions. This way, anytime I come back to this piece of writing, which I often do, I always reread things that I find are really good. I'll see the words that I had to look at previously and I'll be able to have easy access to their meaning now. This is great because the sentence I just read to you, speak your latent conviction. My brain thought it knew what latent meant, but then I thought, do I really know what latent means? So I looked it up. I had no idea what it meant. I thought I did, but I did not. I circled it, I put a little one next to it, and I wrote the definition at the bottom of my essay. Self reliance. The definition of latent is existing but not yet developed. So here's the cool thing. Once you know the definition, I want you to sort of substitute it into the sentence. The sentence being speak your latent conviction now becomes speak your existing but not yet developed conviction. So it's a very different sentence for me at. And I think a journal is a beautiful tool for helping us do that. We are walking around with existing but not yet developed convictions. All I mean by that is we have a whole bunch of beliefs in our head that are related to, I don't know, how families should behave, what religions to follow, what government should be doing, how I should dress, and so on. All of those are convictions we have in our hearts. But I would challenge most people to say you probably have not defined those in a really clarifying way. You probably mostly have a sense of what you believe, but when you're actually forced to sit down and write out your belief system and think, do I actually believe that or not? It's sort of coming face to face with your demons and your, your angels to figure out who you really are as a person. A journal is a nice place to do that because it's a safe place, right? You, if you try to develop your convictions in public with your friends or whatever, you might say things you don't mean, you might Say things that aren't developed yet. You might feel self conscious and so on, but in a journal, you can be as sloppy and as messy as possible and you can try to figure out these convictions and find your own voice. That's the beautiful thing here. So a journal isn't about writing about today's events like, you know, the weather was 78 degrees and it rained a little. That's not what a journalist for. At least not in Emerson's world and not in mine. A journal is about developing your latent convictions. The second sentence that I thought was applicable to journaling is envy is ignorance. Imitation is suicide. Now Emerson tells us that we should stop imitating other people and we should start living our own lives. He loved to read books. He had a really impressive library. But sometimes people get confused because Emerson sounds like he's bagging on reading. It sounds like he's sort of down on reading because he tells you to stop going to the books for all your answers. You need to think for yourself. And some people have, have sort of translated that to mean that you should not rely on past wisdom and that you should just sort of be foolish and go have your own thoughts. That's not what he's saying at all. He read constantly. He loved the sages of the past. What he was wary of, though, is when people only turn to the sages of the past. So if you need an answer to something, instead of thinking for a minute about your thoughts and your situation and what you can add to the conversation, if you just pull up on Plato and say, well, Plato says this, therefore that's the answer, we're gonna do that, right? That's probably not a real strong way to read a book. Reading a book is stage one. Understanding it and taking notes is stage two. But then we apply the ideas, meaning we go out into the world and we try them out and we add to the conversation. I often tell people in my book club that when we highlight things, we reserve our yellow highlighters for times in the book where we disagree with our authors. And I encourage people to have conversations with Plato or Shakespeare or, you know, Tolstoy or whoever we're reading. You are more than welcome to disagree. And that's what the margins are for, right? Marginalia is a place for you to have a conversation with Harriet Beecher Stowe as she's writing about Uncle Tom's Cabin. And you can talk about what's working and what's not. So I think we see this a lot, right? If you are anything like me and you like to create, maybe you like to do podcasting, or maybe you're an artist or whatever it is. I think Emerson's hitting the nail on the head here. If we spend our lives just imitating others, if we go to the sages of the past, the artists of the past, and we just do what they do because they were the smart ones, and we immediately discount ourselves because our ideas aren't very good because they're ours, and yada, yada, yada, then we are missing the real passion of life. We are missing our ability to stand up and be self reliant. Okay, three more sentences here. I hope you're liking this. This is probably the most famous quote in the essay. It is that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I love this quote. Now again, people might be thinking that Emerson is sort of railing here on routine and habit. You know, it sounds like he's saying, hey, stop being consistent. That's a foolish thing to do. It is the hobgoblin of little minds to just do the same thing every day. Again, that is not what he's saying. He's saying a foolish consistency is the problem. By that he means that you are doing things that you know are dead. You are supporting ideas or concepts that are dead, but you're doing them again and again because that's the way you've always done them and you're just going to keep doing them that way. So a great example of this is he mentions that if you are sort of supporting an ideology that's dead, or you're supporting a church that's dead or whatever, that is a waste of your time and your life. I like running and owning businesses, right? That's something that I've always tried to do and to do well. And I've noticed as an entrepreneur that when you start a new business, you know in your heart that this thing is going to work or it's not. And I've seen so many business owners in my because I own an accounting firm by day where we coach entrepreneurs around the country. And I cannot tell you how many times I've seen them where they're just so dang attached to their business and they want it to work. But every signal is saying the ship is sinking, you need to get off this ship. But they won't do it because they're so passionately attached to the thing. And so they show up every day, they keep putting money into it, they keep sort of burying themselves, burying themselves until they are completely underwater. And that is a foolish consistency, right? We know this is a ship we should not be on. We know it's not right. But we do it because we're emotionally attached. And as Emerson says, that is the hobgoblin of little minds. And I think, boy, that sounds good on paper, but in real life that is hard to implement because I get emotionally attached to things and it is hard for me to give up on ideas. Something that might be more applicable to this community is sticking with a book that is not working for you, right? Some people have the rule that when I start a book, I must finish it. I absolutely have to finish it. And I love that determination, right, that, that, that ambition to be a good reader. But I'm going to push back and say that not all books are good books and you only have one life, and it is a life, by the way. And there are so many great things to read that it can feel a little foolish to be stuck 400 pages into an 800 page book that you are hating, but you're going to just slog through it because you are the kind of person that reads every book to the end. So that's an example. And take it or leave it. You, you can agree or disagree, but I, I feel like I'm trying to get better in my own life of acknowledging when I'm being a little foolish, foolishly consistent. Because yeah, it definitely can be a hobgoblin. I think that's an interesting choice of word too. A hobgoblin of little minds. In my mind, the hobgoblin is something that is always in the background, distracting you, sort of throwing tomatoes at you, right? Making you feel bad about yourself. And you just sort of stand on the stage and let this hobgoblin throw those tomatoes at you and boo and jeer. That's in my mind how this thing works. And if I'm being foolishly consistent, I feel my time slipping away. I feel my life slipping away, and that is not what I want. Now, the fourth line here is, man is timid and apologetic. He dares not say, I think I am. Emerson loved the sort of nostalgic, romantic version of the human race that had great ideas, that went out and fought for them, that stood up to the face of tyranny and said no or yes or whatever it is that we're going to do. And he was looking around society and seeing a bunch of sort of armchair thinkers, people who in their private moments had their ideas, but when it came to actually living and fighting for those ideas when they got out into society just sort of collapsed and melded into the herd and did not speak up for themselves. And this is something that I think is quite pertinent today. It's even worse, right, because we can hide behind our avatars, we can get into social media and we can, we can be as, as forcefully voiceful as we want, but we're doing it behind the avatar, you know, John Bobble 461 or whatever it is. And we can be impolite and rude and just awful if we decide to. And it's okay because then we can go back to our normal life and we got to scratch that itch. I don't love this part of our society and I suspect that maybe you don't as well, but Emerson was really wanting us to be able to have our own thoughts here. To say, I think and I am versus turning to other people and other, maybe political parties or religions and saying, what should I be? Who am I? Can you give me some sort of framework to tell me how I should live my life? You know, should I be Republican or should I be Democrat? What am I? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna take on that mantle and I'm gonna believe everything that group believes, no matter what. Because that's who we are, right? We're this thing. Emerson would say that's probably a dangerous way to live. Instead, you should be you and you should have your thoughts. And the best way to, to live that, in my opinion, is to carry a journal with you. Because a journal forces you to be by yourself and to think about your thoughts, right? Instead of sitting in a group of people who are persuading you. When you're in your journal, you can become yourself. And the more time you spend with yourself, the more you become yourself. This is why I think journaling is such a powerful tool. Okay, the last line in this essay and then I will give you a quick book recommendation. And why get you out of here. The line is this. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. This is at the end of the essay. And I like this because, you know, on a day to day basis you are feeling a wave of emotions. Some days you're happy, some days you're sad, some days you're stressed and so on. And it's very easy for me at least to try and look to outward sources to bring me happiness. I'll call up friends and we'll go out for some food or whatever, and in that moment I will feel better, right? I'LL feel happy because I'm surrounded by people I love, love. But when I go home and I'm back to being by myself, I'm back to being either sad or happy or stressed or anxious. That is because you take yourself with you wherever you go. Right? And I think having a journal is nice because it's a really great. I'm not going to say it replaces a therapist. A journal absolutely does not replace therapy. Therapy is great. But it is a great way to acknowledge the things that you're going through and work through those in a real way. So, you know, your journal can be a very private place for you to work on things that you're just really mentally and emotionally struggling with. And I found for me, at least, that when I. When I get those thoughts on paper, I instantly feel more clarity. And clarity gives me a way forward. And when I have a way forward, I have momentum. And when I have momentum, I'm feeling better, baby. So let's get some momentum in our lives. Oh, actually, I want to go back really quickly. So in that last statement, I've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying, look, I hear you. A journal is a place to write my deepest, darkest thoughts. But I don't want to do that because what if somebody finds my journal? What if somebody. What if my kids find this and they realize that mom or dad had a drinking problem or. Or whatever problem, right? And I don't want them to think poorly about me. So I'm just going to keep it all bottled up. I'm not going to write it on my journal. That is a very fair fear, and I think that's something that many, many people feel. A couple solutions. One, you can keep your journals in a safe if you have to, and tell nobody the code. Two, this is an interesting solution. I have one member in my book club who loves to write her deepest, darkest secrets in her journal. And then when she's done, she burns the thing. She actually burns it. She has sort of like a ceremony that like, like, lets all of those bad thoughts go. She got them on paper. She got clarity and momentum. She got her way forward. And then she burns the dang thing because it's now out of her life and she can live and be free and do her thing. It's up to you, right? Or you can keep your journal and take on the attitude that you know what, you're human. And when your kids see these things that you struggle with, they might actually have more respect for you because they realize that you were going through things and that you were still fighting to put food in their bellies and lights, you know, keep the lights on and so on. Okay, let's get you a book recommendation here. I, I came across this book called Open Socrates the Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard. I love these kinds of books where a modern day writer will write about an old thinker who, let's be honest, people, the old thinkers can sometimes be hard to understand. So if you like to read Plato, which is where you would find Socrates or Aristotle or, or Nietzsche or whoever it is, their writing can feel quite dense at times. One, because the ideas are abstract, and two, they're writing in sometimes old English or, you know, it's been translated 100 times. And so the ideas aren't always flowing the way they would if you were reading a modern day novel. That's why I like these new authors coming out who are taking the time to really get to know the material like Agnes has done here, and then write it in a way that the common, everyday people like myself can understand. This has just been a fun book. Socrates himself was the guy who mentioned that a life is not worth living if it's unexamined. Right? You must live the examined life. And, and what he meant by that is going around and asking the right kinds of questions so that you're living the best possible way you can. Socrates is this funny guy. He was this really annoying guy. He upset a lot of people because he would walk around in his toga all day long and he would just ask some questions. He didn't assume he knew the answer to everything. He just genuinely wanted to know why you thought what you did. And he was annoying because when he asked the question, why do you think you know this thing? Or what is it that, you know, people often could not get their words out in a clarifying way. That's why I wanted to give you this book recommendation today. Because Socrates, speaking to Socrates in the past is a bit like writing a journal or writing in your journal because you're walking around with your thoughts and your behaviors and your beliefs, but you haven't clarified them. And when you have to clarify them, you realize this is kind of hard. Why do I believe this? Why am I doing this? Why do I behave this way? And Socrates would make you answer those questions. And it was a very enlightening case. And this to him was living the examined life. Okay, that's it for this week's episode of the Readwell podcast. Hey, if you like this, I would really appreciate it if you could go to Apple itunes and just give the podcast a rating. Let me know how I'm doing. You can select from one to five stars. Hopefully we're on the higher end of the hat, but my goal here is to provide you with some time to slow down each week and to think about something that truly matters. And this week, of course, we talked about Ralph Walt Emerson and the benefits of journaling. And again, if you like that, thank you so much for being in the community. I look forward to spending some time with you next week week. And until then, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thanks everyone. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read, read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well Podcast.