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

by Ryan Holiday

Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

But let us look to the courageous moments and learn from them rather than focus on another’s flaws as a way of excusing our own.

if we wish to be great, we must first learn how to conquer fear, or at least rise above it in the moments that matter.

Do you know what the most repeated phrase in the Bible is? It’s “Be not afraid.”

The Stoics, the Christians—they didn’t fault anyone for having an emotional reaction. They only cared what you did after the shine of that feeling wore off. “Be scared. You can’t help that,” William Faulkner put it. “But don’t be afraid.” It’s an essential distinction. A scare is a temporary rush of a feeling. That can be forgiven. Fear is a state of being, and to allow it to rule is a disgrace. One helps you—makes you alert, wakes you up, informs you of danger. The other drags you down, weakens you, even paralyzes you.

We can’t forget that all the energy we spend fearing that we’ll make it worse is energy not spent making it better.

As Epictetus, shaped by the empathy cultivated from his thirty years in slavery, would say, until we know someone’s reasons, we don’t even know that they acted wrongly.

no matter how physically tough or brilliant you are. Fear determines what is or isn’t possible.

If you fear that there isn’t anything you can do, chances are you will do nothing. You will also be nothing. A protected, self-justifying nothing.

All growth is a leap in the dark. If you’re afraid of that, you’ll never do anything worthwhile.

If fear is to be a driving force in your life, fear what you’ll miss. Fear what happens if you don’t act. Fear what they’ll think of you down the road, for having dared so little. Think of what you’re leaving on the table.

We are afraid to open up. We are scared to share. We don’t want anyone to know how we’re feeling inside . . . and so all of us feel more alone. What strength it takes to beat back this fear. What pain is caused by the inability or the unwillingness to do so.

Good quote

We choose what voice we will listen to. We choose whether we’ll play it safe, think small, be afraid, conform, hide, or be cynical. We choose whether we will break these fears down, whether we’ll go our own way, whether we look down over the side of the narrow bridge and turn back—or keep going. To have courage? To brave fear? That’s our call. We don’t have to do it.

We can curse the darkness, or we can light a candle. We can wait for someone else to come and save us, or we can decide to stand and deliver ourselves. Which will it be?

The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.

Training is not just something that athletes and soldiers do. It is the key to overcoming fear in any and all situations. What we do not expect, what we have not practiced, has an advantage over us. What we have prepared for, what we have anticipated, we will be able to answer.

What we are familiar with, we can manage.

You get comfortable with discomfort.

Because while fear wants you to spend the day in deliberation, courage knows that won’t be possible.