Confidence

Confidence is the ability to believe something or someone and trust that they wont let you down. Confidence is when you have to "rely on someone or something else" other than yourself. Confidence also takes courage and trust. Trust because you have to believe that person you believe in wont let you down or hurt you. Courage because you need the guts to believe them. Confidence is a key to success because you have to be confident that you will succeed. If you doubt yourself you will not succeed.

Free Thought

One of the five tenets of Transcendentalism is free thought. Us as human beings have our own natural rights and free thought is one of those rights. A good thing about free thought is no matter what no one can take away our own free thought. Emerson quotes "All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen."This is Ralph Waldo Emerson's free thought on how everything he has learned he trusts his creator for the stuff he must just believe in and learn later.

Non-Conformity

The Transcendentalism based essay "Self-Reliance", written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, has one quote that relates to non-conformity and really speaks to me. It says: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” What this tells me is that everyone that follows the crowd is going to stay a small foolish person. People need to go with their own ideas. If people followed each other and had the same ideas, we wouldn't be as advanced as we are today. People need to stand out and make their own decisions. That will need to new ideas and new advancements in life.

Self-Reliance

In the essay "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He explains how being independent and not following the crowd is the key to being happy in life. People who follow the crowd don't think for themselves and don't create there own ideas. He mentions many historically famous people who were independent and misunderstood by everyone else and became great from being self-reliant. "Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”In order to be great you must take that step away from the crowd and go your own direction in life and that is the definition of being self-reliant.

Introduction to Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and their group is a spiritual practice. It says that life's daily experiences such as  loving, parenting, working, an being outdoors holds spiritual meaning that can be discovered and explored throughout life.Transcendentalism is like a religious practice, there are no systems to study, no languages to learn, and no organizations to join. Transcendentalism is simple, and is a welcome alternative to many  religions that compete for our attention today."All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." -Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson is the founder of the Transcendentalism idea. He believed that life was a spiritual practice and everything happened for a reason. Transcendentalism is divided into five key tenants: Non-Conformity, Self-Reliance, free thought, Confidence, and Naturalism.