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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
May 26 - June 10, 2022
If cowardice is failure to do your duty, then courage is the decision to step up and do it. Answering the call. Overriding fear and seizing your destiny. Doing the thing you cannot do because it needs to be done . . . with fortitude and spirit, guts and grit, even if you have no idea if you’ll succeed. This will not be easy. But we cannot fear. We must, as Shakespeare said, “meet the time as it seeks us.” Our destiny is here. Let’s seize it.
It has been said that “one man with courage makes a majority,” and so it went with de Gaulle.
Since we know that de Gaulle was ultimately victorious, we have chosen to remember that France was united in resistance to its occupiers. This is sadly not the case. People were afraid.
That is the thing about courage: Just like fear, it is contagious.
What we are familiar with, we can manage. Danger can be mitigated by experience and by good training. Fear leads to aversion. Aversion to cowardice. Repetition leads to confidence. Confidence leads to courage.
Yes, we’re talking about practice. Because it’s the most important thing. With practice, you go through the actions in your mind. You build the muscle memory of what you do in this situation or that one. You learn how to fortify and are fortified in the process. You run through the drills, you play your scales. You have someone ask you purposely tough questions. You get comfortable with discomfort. You train at your T-pace for deliberate intervals, raising your threshold as a runner. You familiarize. You assemble your rifle with a blindfold on, you work out with a weight vest on. You do it a
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Start small . . . on something big.
Eliminate one problem. Move things one iota. Write one sentence. Send one letter. Make a spark. We can figure out what’s next after that.
(Rivers are more easily forded at their source, goes the expression.) Build some momentum, some confidence as you begin crossing stuff off the list.
In the words of the decorated Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, to get over the fear, you go. You just do. You leap into the dark. It is the only way.
But if you don’t go? Well, you ensure failure and suffer a different kind of death. Later, you’re going to wish you did something. We always do. Which means, right now, you gotta go.
Still, it must be stipulated that the obligation to tell the truth is not a license to be cruel. Socrates was trying to help people get to what mattered. His intention was not to offend, only to teach. But that he did offend some people, that he did make some enemies? That didn’t stop him from the pursuit of wisdom nor put him off his duty.
Marshall cut through with a command: “Gentlemen, don’t fight the problem! Decide it!”
The rarest of all the gifts from the Gods, Acheson realized, was the ability to decide. To succeed in life, in foreign policy, in a complicated and messy world, a leader must learn how to make decisions with courage and clarity. No equivocation. No vacillation.
“Your job as president is to decide,” Acheson wrote. “Mr. Truman decided.”
The doctor in the operating room cannot delay, they must make their decisions quickly, they must act on them and have the courage to face the life-and-death results of the performance. The fighter, the trader, the performer, the CEO at a company in turnaround—every leader is in the same bind. There is a savagery to these professions, where consequences hang in the balance. A strike at the jugular is needed, people must be laid off, checks must be written. There is something awful about this savagery—but no one gains, least of all the vulnerable people at stake, by tarrying or timidity.
There’s a great expression: Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing. Later, you’re going to wish you did something. Whether it’s leaving an abusive relationship or starting a company, don’t fight it—decide it. Now.
Remember what they said about Serpico. What they said about de Gaulle. What they said about Nightingale. You’re difficult. Of course they were. The well-behaved rarely make history. Had these men and women been a little more conciliatory, a little more willing to accept the role expected of them, had they cared a little bit more about what other people thought, were they a little bit easier to deter, there wouldn’t have been an independent stand to take in the first place.
Courage is defined in the moment. In less than a moment. When we decide to step out or step up. To leap or to step back. A person isn’t brave, generally. We are brave, specifically. For a few seconds. For a few seconds of embarrassing bravery we can be great. And that is enough.
This is true for the most oppressive of opponents. They’ll beat on us so long as we let them beat on us. But when we bring the fight to them, when we start choosing our battleground, focusing on where they are weak? Now we at least have a shot.
You have to demand control of the tempo. You have to set the tempo—in battle, in the boardroom, in matters both big and small. You want them to fear what you are going to do, not the other way around.
When another country called on Sparta for military help, the Spartans wouldn’t send their army. They sent one Spartan commander. This was all it took. Because courage, like fear, is contagious. One person who knows what they are doing, who isn’t afraid, who has a plan is enough to reinforce an outnumbered army, to buck up a broken system, to calm chaos where it has taken root. And so a single Spartan was all their allies needed.
One man with courage makes a majority.
A little boldness now is worth a lot more than death-defying courage later.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has talked about how he doesn’t do “bet the company bets.” Because he doesn’t have to—it’s complacency that puts you in a position to have to take huge risks. It’s the company that, after years of ignoring the trends, finally has to change or die. It’s when you’re making up for earlier deficiencies that you have to gamble everything. Better, he says, to consistently make good bets every day. Calculated instead of careless. Incremental instead of incredibly dangerous.
Courage isn’t about measuring dicks. Or idle bravado. It doesn’t mean forsaking a motorcycle helmet because you think you’re invincible. 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.
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 they must call upon their courage. And still, in action they will be deliberate and calm, methodical and measured.
No good guy should ever have to draw a gun on a bad guy. No one should ever have to defend themselves as a consequence of doing the right thing.
Even Gandhi, a man of incredible gentleness and restraint, knew there was a line that must sometimes be crossed. “Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence,” he said, “I would advise violence.”
Violence is rarely the answer—but when it is, it’s the only answer.
Kind words will not cut it. Poise will not protect us. What will be called for is intensity, aggression, a demonstration of force. In these moments, we cannot shy away. We cannot shrink. We cannot be bullied. We cannot do nothing. In those moments, we’ll have to hit back, and we’ll have to hit hard. We must raise our fists. We must make our stand. Lest we end up on our knees.
When Apple had drifted from its innovative and rebellious roots, this was a tactic Steve Jobs used to bring the company back on track. “One way to remember who you are,” he said, “is to remember who your heroes are.”
Gates of Fire, the epic historical novel of this battle by Steven Pressfield, is today passed from soldier to soldier, person to person, as a kind of tribute to that example. The central question of the book was: What is the opposite of fear? It’s not enough to simply conquer or quench fear.
It wasn’t just the men and their arms that made feats at Thermopylae possible. It was also the wives who not only allowed their husbands to go, but whose courage and iron self-discipline was the backbone of the country. The toughness and selflessness of Spartan women is legendary. When one Spartan king was killed in a vicious coup, his mother rushed to his body, and when the killers offered to spare her if she kept quiet, she stood up and defied them. Her last words, as she offered her neck: “May this only be of service to Sparta.”
We are mistaken to see the Spartans as mere warriors, just courageous fighters. As Pressfield concludes, the opposite of fear—the true virtue contrasted with that vice—was not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. Love for one another. Love for ideas. Love for your country.
It’s good to be brave. The world does want to know if you have cojones. But the why, the where, the when of it counts. The cause makes all.
It took even more courage to do battle without weapons, to fight with one’s soul and one’s spirit against armed and angry enemies.
Imagine the courage of young Malala Yousafzai, targeted and left for dead by the Taliban, for trying to go to school. “Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me,” she said, “I would not shoot him.”
People want to read books about wars . . . not the diplomacy that prevented them from happening. People want to hear about the whistleblowers . . . not the leaders who were able to effectively reform companies from the inside without it needing to come to that. We make movies about those brave iconoclasts who do everything differently . . . but what about someone who makes a difference and is able to fit in and function in society?
Sun Tzu would say that it is best to win without fighting—to have maneuvered in such a way that the enemy has lost before it has even begun.
that’s how it worked out for Lincoln. Despite his valiant efforts, he could not stop those who preferred to “make war rather than let the nation survive.” He did, through his restraint, however, manage to maneuver the South into its unwinnable role as the aggressor in the Civil War.
Yes, we must be willing to negotiate. We’re willing to compromise. But run away? No. We avoid the petty fights so we can be ready for the ones that matter.
For nearly ten years Churchill languished at his estate outside London. Or so his enemies thought. In fact, he was reading. He was writing. He was resting. He was making valuable contacts. He was waiting for his moment.
“Every prophet has to come from civilization,” Churchill would explain, “but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society . . . and he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”
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For selfish reasons, Churchill could have quit, just as you can quit at any time. Churchill was fifty-four years old in 1929. He could have retired. Out of spite, he could have retreated to his own pursuits and pleasures.
The greater the sacrifice, the greater the glory. Even if the achievements don’t seem so notable . . . . . . the mother who puts her dream aside to care for her sick child. . . . the immigrant who puts on an apron each day despite their foreign medical degree. . . . the employee who quits a high-paying or high-status job in an industry they now believe is making the world a worse place. . . . the person whose reputation unfairly takes a public beating as they silently protect someone else.
“Character,” de Gaulle reflected at the end of his life, “is above all the ability to disregard insults or abandonment by one’s own people. One must be willing to lose everything. There is no such thing as half a risk.” That’s a damn good definition of heroism too.
Incredible courage is required of the immigrant and the refugee. To leave one’s home behind, to try to provide your family a better life? But just as it is some people’s destiny to cross oceans and deserts, it may be our destiny to stay, literally or figuratively.
Why didn’t they get out? The answer, as it often is with reformers, is that they believed they could do more good by staying than going, by returning than living in exile. They were willing to run the risks. They knew how the powers that be would respond, and they were brave enough to take their stands anyway.
