Leaders, Followers, and Individuality: Insights from Emerson

There are two different kinds of people in the world: leaders and followers. Some individuals are born leaders, some natural born followers, and others just haven’t lived long enough to figure it out. One thing that should be said to the followers and the undecided: don’t become something you’re not just to please others. You have to please yourself first. Being yourself and pleasing your conscience is what is needed to succeed in life. And although it may be tempting to follow the new trend or the new fad, you have to think of what the future will bring by not doing. You have to remember: individuality is the key. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea an individual’s need to avoid conformity and believe in their own thoughts in Self-Reliance

I believe that this could be a response to Ellison’s Invisible Man because of this first quote, “But sometimes, you go looking for adventure, and all you find is disaster,” (Sparks). The quote is saying that you should leave it all up to fate to decide what your destiny is. The narrator in Ellison’s story did not search on his own but he was forced to after he was kicked out of college. He was considered successful when he joined the Brotherhood but in the end, it ended terribly. On the next quote, you will have to think a little differently. In the quote, “Once you understand how the ingredients work together, then you can go off on your own,”(Sparks), you have to think of “ingredients” as the world. By doing that, it is understood that the quote means that once you know how the world works, then you can find who you are. Take the narrator for instance. He was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of life while beginning his new life in a city he is new to. He did not know any of the customs or the ways of the north because he grew up in the south and based his future on southern customs. This last quote is an opinion expressed by Charlie in Queen Sugar. “I am just like them, no better and no worse. I am black, Remy, which means everything and nothing,” sounds like it is talking about the black community as a whole, which it is but by Charlie putting herself into the thought, it makes it more personal. It talks about her being her own individual person and what it means for her to be black in a southern society. Her situation is similar to the narrator’s because although he was in the north, he still struggled on what it meant and how to be black in a whole new society. Again, he did grow up in the south so the things in the north like a desegregated community or the higher level of respect a black man got, were different to