Emerson’s essay Success is as relevant today as it was over 100 years ago. He begins by noting how, in America, “people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance.” As a people and a country we like to be first and best, we are always on the go, there is always something new to be invented or someplace to be explored. “We respect ourselves more if we have succeeded.” But all of these things and feats don’t signify much of anything. We are creating nothing but conveniences and should remember that

Newton was a great man, without telegraph, or gas, or steam-coach, or rubber shoes, or lucifer-matches, or ether for his pain; so was Shakespeare, and Alfred, and Scipio, and Socrates.

There is a tendency to strive for and celebrate success for the sake of success regardless of the cause or means of that success. It fosters a sort of insanity, recklessness and egotism with get rich quick schemes and scams:

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell, or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud.

People who think they have got success in this way don’t really have success at all, what they have, according to Emerson, is “a crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that; these are steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming of mankind.”

The popular notion of success–good public opinion, fame, wealth–Emerson sees as standing in direct opposition to real and “wholesome” success–private, humble, loving and generous. The secret to real success is threefold, self-trust, sensibility, and embracing the affirmative.

Self-trust is

the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful.

I really like this, because how many trust ourselves enough to follow the work we are meant to do? How many of us even trust that we know what that work is? And how many of us know what we are supposed to do but do something else because what we want to do just isn’t practical, or viewed as culturally worthy? Or maybe we don’t trust that we have enough ability or talent to do the task we are called to do. It is certainly a gift to be celebrated if you have talent that helps you excel at you work, but it is not a requirement, “It is enough if you work in the right direction.” Since part of self-trust is believing we are put here by “the authorities of the universe,” we also must trust that the task we were given to do by those authorities is one we can do since it turns out that our work is really a door into the “central intelligence” of the universe. And if we trust and dare, and step through that door, what we will find is self-possession.

The second key to success is sensibility. Sensibility is feeling, passion, love. It is a cheerful temper, receptivity, harmony. “Feel yourself, and be not daunted by things,” says Emerson. To believe that there are only a few who are great or can achieve greatness is wrong, everyone contains “divine possibilities.” We begin life with natural sensibilities and they are crowded out of us by “artificial arrangements.” When we were young “the earth spoke and the heavens glowed,” but now it takes “a rare combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and the mean.”

But Nature is giving us a lesson in sensibility everyday if we only care to learn it: “The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is only half; it is also made of color.” In other words, the world is not just trees and hills and lakes and animals, it is not just “figures,” it is also made of color. “In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color.” I so love this comparison. Nature combines figure and color so well the two are nearly inseparable, yet in our lives we somehow find is easy to break thought apart from sentiment, to even go so far as to disparage sentiment and elevate pure knowledge above all else. But Nature, and Emerson, reminds us that the two compliment each other. He tells us that a person with intellectual and moral sensibilities is more impressionable and receptive and therefore more able to see affinities and the relationships between all things.

With sensibility also comes a susceptibility to beauty. “The world is always opulent,” and “beauty warms the heart.” The divine has marked what is good and true and lasting with beauty, beauty which inundates us “with the tides of joy.”

The third and final secret to success is choosing the positive, embracing the affirmative. There is evil in the world, but there is also good. We can choose to be cynics, to complain, to be pessimistic and always see and expect the worst from everyone we meet. Or, we can choose to be affirmative:

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception. As calories to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it.

It is “cheap and easy to destroy.” Who has not taken delight in cutting into someone’s happiness? There is a phrase I’ve heard and used–to burst someone’s bubble–that applies to a situation in which someone cynical, and therefore by most opinions wiser, “bursts the bubble” of someone who is, in our opinion, ignorantly happy about something. We see people who are affirmative, optimistic, happy, as deluded, silly, simple, surrounded by a bubble that separates them from the real world and we think it our job to pop the bubble, to educate them to be as mean and unhappy as ourselves. It is easy to drag others into the muck with us but to

add energy, inspire hope and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.

We live an external life and an inner life, says Emerson. The popular notion of success belongs to the external life and is not the kind of success we should hold in high esteem. The success Emerson talks about in this essay belongs to the inner life, to the soul:

It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun and broods on the world.

If you want your soul to lie in the sun and brood on the world, then remember the secrets to success are self-trust, sensibility, and choosing the affirmative.

Next week’s Emerson, the final essay in Society and Solitude: Old Age