Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave (The Stoic Virtues Series)

by Ryan Holiday

It was Aristotle who said that the optimistic are the most vulnerable, because “when the result does not turn ...

Foresee the worst to perfor...

When the wolves are counted, there are fewer of them. Mountains turn out to be molehills, monsters turn out just to be men.

Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.

Nec aspera terrent. Don’t be frightened by difficulties.

We all need adversaries and adversity to exist.

“Plenty and peace breed cowards,” Shakespeare said. “Hardness ever of hardiness is mother.”

It’s not bad that this is happening to you. It’s good training. Besides, not everyone would even have th...

It’s good that it’s hard. It deters the cowards and it intrigues the courageous.

In emergencies like ours calculation is out of place; the sooner the danger is faced the better.”

“Life itself is far too risky a business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth regard,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. It’s better to just get to work. To face what you’ve got to face sooner rather than later.

Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Whether it’s six things or five—or sixty-five—the point is, what’s in front of you is what matters. The sooner the better, as Demosthenes said.

So how can you possibly do it well if your mind is elsewhere? If you’re concerned about how so-and-so is going to react? If you’re already half-preparing yourself for failure? If you’ve already latched on to all the reasons this is a bad idea? The answer is simple: You can’t.

Apply yourself to thinking through difficulties—hard times can be softened, tight squeezes widened, and heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure. It’s a tricky balance, but you got it.

Never Question Another Man’s Courage

It’s very easy to judge. It’s very hard to know.

We are not privy to the full extent of the struggle and the burden under which others have broken.

What we know is that we have plenty of areas in our own life where fear is holding us back, blinding us, breaking us.

Don’t bother with “What would I do in their shoes?” Ask: “What am I doing now?” In your own life. With your own fears.

Let us put in the work where it matters—not in condemnation or investigations.

Waste not a second questioning another man’s courage. Put that scrutiny solely on your own.

We go through life in two ways. We choose between effective truths: that we have the ability to change our situation, or that we are at the mercy of the situations in which we find ourselves. We can rely on luck . . . or cause and effect.

“Courage is in shorter supply than genius,” Thiel once wrote. In fact, fear, uncertainty, and bad advice muted his genius. For all his money, with all his connections, with all his skill and resources, he believed he was impotent. And so he was. As you are, about the hard problems that currently vex and intimidate you. Such is the power of agency—and our belief in it.

Scholars remind us that the opposite of andreia—the ancient Greek word for “courage”—is not cowardice. It’s melancholia. Courage is honest commitment to noble ideals. The opposite of courage is not, as some argue, being afraid. It’s apathy. It’s disenchantment. It’s despair. It’s throwing up your hands and saying, “What’s the point anyway?”

If we don’t believe in anything, it becomes very hard to find anything worth believing in.

The brave don’t despair. They believe.

Earnest is not easy. Not as easy as fear and doubt, anyway.

We have to insist there is a point to all this—a point to our lives, a point to our decisions, a point to who we are. What is that point? It’s what we do. It’s the decisions we make. It’s the impact we seek.

W. E. B. Du Bois was right when he said it was preferable to stand tall in a mud puddle than lick boots in the parlor.

All growth is a leap in the dark. If you’re afraid of that, you’ll never do anything worthwhile. If you take counsel of your fears, you’ll never take that step, make that leap.

What if there was certainty, if there was a well-lit, well-defined path? If life were like this, no courage would be required.

The coward waits for the stairs that will never come. They want to know the probabilities. They want time to prepare. They want assurances. They hope for a reprieve. They’re willing to give up anything to get these things, including this moment of opportunity that will never, ever come back.

“Rather ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world,” Florence Nightingale reminds us, “than stand idly on the shore.”

The fear you feel is a sign. If courage is never required in your life, you’re living a boring life. Put yourself in a position that demands you leap.

Don’t Fear Decisions

As the song goes, even if you choose not to decide—even if you put things off—you still have made a choice. You are voting for the status quo. You are voting to let them decide. You are voting to give up your own agency.

Can’t lose if you don’t choose? Of course you can. You lose the moment. You lose the momentum. You lose your ability to look yourself in the mirror.

Because the courage to be different is the courage to think different, to see what others don’t see, to hear what others don’t hear. It’s not a coincidence that so many whistleblowers and artists were weirdos. It was precisely their weirdness that allowed them to see what everyone else was unable to see.

Be original. Be yourself. To be anything else is to be a coward.

Don’t let the opinion of cowards influence what you think or do. The future depends on it.

Our fear of what other people think, of embarrassment or awkwardness, is not the same fear that holds a man back from running into battle, but it is a limitation, a deficiency of courage that deprives us of our destiny all the same.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

Funny bit. Hahaha

Such is life. It doesn’t care about our rathers. You will have to stand alone from time to time. If you can’t even do that to deliver a talk, how will you possibly have the courage to do it when it counts?

You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t. You have to be willing not only to step away from the herd but get up in front of them and say what you truly think or feel. It’s called “public life” for a reason.

We must remember that history is not filled with fairy tales, but flesh and blood. Real people, people like you—people no better, certainly no healthier than you—squared up against fate, took her punches, threw their best shot.

To have courage? To brave fear? That’s our call. We don’t have to do it. But we can’t escape the fact that it is the thing upon which every other good thing depends.

We can curse the darkness, or we can light a candle.

It is the cowardice of others that creates the opportunities for the individual hero.

Still, it is essential that we understand that courage is more than just the stand. It’s more than just the choice of Hercules, between the easy road and the hard one. One then has to walk that hard road.