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

by Ryan Holiday

There is no deed in this life so impossible that you cannot do it. Your whole life should be lived as a heroic deed.

We need people to challenge the status quo. We need artists who probe personal issues . . . and make public critiques. We need politicians who insist on leading from a place of honesty, and they themselves need expert advisers who do not hesitate to tell them unpleasant facts. We need a population that refuses to tolerate propaganda, rationalizations, or cover-ups. People in every station who are willing to stand up and say, “This is not right. I won’t be a part of it.” We need you to say that.

Courage is about risk, but only necessary risk. Only carefully considered risk.

This is why the truly brave are often rather quiet. No time for, no interest in, boasting. Besides, they know that bragging puts a target on their back, and what is to be gained from that? That doesn’t mean they’re timid or self-effacing. As Aristotle again points out, straightforwardness is the intermediate between exaggeration and belittling. When you know, you know.

When you encounter real courage in this world, you will feel its intensity before you see it. It will not manifest in a caricature of the thrill-seeker or the daredevil. The courageous do not, as we have said, run around half-cocked. They are not stupid and therefore do not actively seek conflict. Even in their daring, they will be subdued unless you happen to find them in the midst of one of those rare decisive moments where th...

You have to believe you can make a difference. You have to try to make one.

no situation is hopeless, we’re never without agency. We can always bravely pack up and move.

When to deescalate? When to charge in? Whether it’s a physical battle or a moral one, we follow Shakespeare’s advice in his famous “To thine own self be true” speech from Hamlet: Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bear ’t that th’ opposed may beware of thee.

Eventually, inevitably, if you are

an independent, visionary, or principled person, you will find yourself alienated. Alienated from your peers. Alienated from the tenor of your times. You may be fired. You may be thrown out of office or made a pariah. Or, best-case scenario, humored but ignored. You can let this break you, or you can let it form you—form you into the person that destiny is calling you to become.

You’ll need patience and endurance and most of all love. You can’t let this period make you bitter. You have to make sure it makes you better.

To give in to fear is to deny the talents and skills that got you where you are in the first place. It’s to deprive yourself of the agency you were given at birth.