THE CAPTAIN'S METHOD™
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where this shows up in the Captain’s Method
Emerson is the voice behind The Inner Ring lesson in the Focus section, where members look at what they traded away to belong and practice standing on their own read of a situation. He also sits behind the Writing chapter and Field Notes, where a member writes what they saw and thought in plain words of their own. On the Debate Stage his advice to state today's conviction in hard words, and change it tomorrow if the evidence moves, is the posture we ask for.
- Personality
Self-trust is his whole subject, the willingness to step into uncertainty on your own judgment that the Adventure Personality builds.
- Focus
He asks a person to look with their own eyes before borrowing anyone's opinion, the counterweight to the pull of The Inner Ring.
- Capacity
His advice to speak what you think in hard words, and revise it when you learn more, is a writing and debating skill.
Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, graduated from Harvard, and became a Unitarian minister, then resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832 over the way he was expected to serve communion. His 1836 essay Nature made him the leading voice of transcendentalism. In 1838 his Divinity School Address so offended Harvard's clergy that he was not invited back to speak there for about thirty years. He lectured and wrote from Concord, Massachusetts, where he befriended and encouraged the young Henry David Thoreau, and he died there in 1882.