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

by Ryan Holiday

“Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental. In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

North, south, east, west—the four virtues are a kind of compass (there’s a reason that the four points on a compass are called the “cardinal directions”). They guide us. They show us where we are and what is true.

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.” Virtue

There is nothing worth doing that is not scary. There is no one who has achieved greatness without wrestling with their own doubts, anxieties, limitations, and demons.

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 has been said that leaders are dealers in hope, but in a more practical sense, they are also slayers of fear.

“False Evidence Appearing Real.” In sobriety circles, as they work to comfort and assuage the worries that hold an addict back from making changes or trying new things, that’s what they call F.E.A.R. False impressions that feel real.

You can’t let fear rule. Because there has never been a person who did something that mattered without pissing people off. There has never been a change that was not met with doubts. There has never been a movement that was not mocked. There was never a groundbreaking business that wasn’t loudly predicted to fail. And there has never, ever been a time when the average opinion of faceless, unaccountable strangers should be valued above our own considered judgment.

“There are always more of them before they are counted.” The obstacles, the enemies, the critics—they are not as numerous as you think. It’s an illusion they want you to believe.

“fear setting”—of defining and articulating the nightmares, anxieties, and doubts that hold us back. Indeed, the ancient roots of this practice go back at least to the Stoics. Seneca wrote about premeditatio malorum, the deliberate meditation on the evils that we might encounter.

And it is in fact the leader’s job to think about the unthinkable. For more than two thousand years, military leaders have had some version of the same maxim: The only inexcusable offense for an officer is to be surprised. To say, I didn’t think that would happen. Each of us needs to cultivate the courage to actually look at what we’re afraid of.

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. Our bruises and scars become armor. Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for one that lies ahead. They are the flavoring that makes victory taste so sweet.

The poet Wilfred Owen put it beautifully from the trenches in France in 1916: Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Thou knowest this man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling. It’s very easy to judge. It’s very hard to know. To know what another person is going through. To know what their reasons are. What interrelated risks they are trying to manage, who and what they are trying to protect.

Xenophon, the great Athenian cavalry commander, once found himself trapped in the middle of Persia, one of ten thousand leaderless Greek troops. As he attempted to rally the men who had begun to despair, who had frozen with fear and frustration, waiting for the next bad event, he explained to them the same dichotomy. He said they could choose between two attitudes, one that said, “What is going to happen to me?” And the other that said, “What action am I going to take?” A few thousand years later, in the same distant lands, General James Mattis reminded his troops of the same thing: “Never think that you are impotent. Choose how you respond.”