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

by Ryan Holiday

Where the road diverged lay a beautiful goddess who offered him every temptation he could imagine. Adorned in finery, she promised him a life of ease. She swore he’d never taste want or unhappiness or fear or pain. Follow her, she said, and his every desire would be fulfilled.

On the other path stood a sterner goddess in a pure white robe. She made a quieter call. She promised no rewards except those that came as a result of hard work. It would be a long journey, she said. There would be sacrifice. There would be scary moments. But it was a journey fit for a god. It would make him the person his ancestors meant him to be.

“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. The “touchstones of goodness,” the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius called them.

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 is something we do.

The martial courage of the soldier and the mental courage of the scientist. But it doesn’t take a philosopher to see that these are actually the same thing.

“To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

Rosa Parks on the bus is courage . . . but so too were her forty-two years of life in the South as a black woman without losing hope, without becoming bitter.

We are in a battle against fear. So we have to study fear, get familiar with it, grapple with its causes and symptoms. This is why the Spartans built temples to fear. To keep it close. To see its power. To ward it off. The brave are not without fear—no human is—rather, it’s their ability to rise above it and master it that makes them so remarkable. In fact, it must be said that greatness is impossible without doing this.

On England’s annals, through the long Hereafter of her speech and song, That light its rays shall cast From portals of the past. A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

They had a word for these immediate, precognitive impressions of things: phantasiai. And they were not to be trusted.

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.

How well we would do to remember the admonishment of Cicero—a man who was laughed at for his nouveau riche origins, for his earnest striving and his love of flowery language—that people have always talked and gossiped and squinted. “Let other people worry over what they will say about you,” he said. “They will say it in any case.”*

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.

The other officer, a little more weathered and experienced than Grant, smiled and pushed on. “Grant, how many wolves do you think are in that pack?” he asked. Not wanting to seem stupid or a coward, Grant tried to casually underestimate the threat that terrified him. “Oh, about twenty,” he said with nonchalance that betrayed his racing heart. Suddenly, Grant and the officer came upon the source of the sound. There, resting comfortably, with mischievous confidence, were just two wolves.

“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.

Douglas MacArthur summed up all failures of war and life in two words: “Too late.” Too late in preparing, too late in grasping the enemy’s intentions, too late in securing allies, too late for leaders to be exchanging contact info, too late in rushing to the aid of those in need. Too late in nothing getting specific, in not counting as Grant learned, or in not preparing for the appearance of the enemy as Napoleon said.

Foresee the worst to perform the best.

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.

This battle against fear is a full-time job.

“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.”

Yes, these things are important, but 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.

Which is why Helvidius fearlessly looked Vespasian in the eye and said, “You will do your part, and I will do mine: It is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow.”

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

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.

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.

That is the thing about courage: Just like fear, it is contagious.

He found out quite a lot about the human condition. “I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards,” he wrote. “Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.”

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. As Epictetus says, the goal when we experience adversity is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.”

That’s what de Gaulle realized about Hitler. That his force was entirely dependent on the “cowardice of others.” No one was willing to call the bully a bully. No one in Germany was willing to see that the emperor had no clothes, and was in fact a raving, murderous lunatic.

There is no one, he said, more miserable than the person “in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.” In fact there is: No one is more miserable than the person who has made cop-outs and cowardice their go-to decision.

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.

You can kill me but you can’t whip me became Douglass’s motto. Indeed, he would not be whipped again, becoming as he said, half free the moment he asserted himself. Soon enough, he claimed the rest of his right by braving the slave catchers as he ran away to freedom.

To use another phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., when we straighten our backs, we might be beaten—but we can’t be ridden.

“Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence,” he said, “I would advise violence.”

In his dialogue with Laches, Socrates asks for a definition of courage. The answer he gets is a good one: “Courage is a sort of endurance of the soul.” Socrates can’t leave it at that, of course, because enduring in the wrong thing, staying and continuing in a foolhardy or impossible endeavor, can hardly be described as wise.

We should all be proud to go out with such a thought. “Any dangerous spot is tenable if brave men will make it so,” John F. Kennedy said.

The CEO who stares down incredible odds to further an exploitative, toxic business. The anti-vaxxer risking opprobrium and illness, literally going against the herd. The dictator who seizes power in a dazzling, daring coup. The police who resign in solidarity when an officer is punished for pushing over an old man in Buffalo. The soldiers taken into custody for refusing to testify against Second Lieutenant William Calley after My Lai. Courage. Hollow courage.

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.” Is that not tougher than the toughest warrior?

A nation should have brave soldiers (physical courage) and wise statesmen (moral courage). One fights the battles, the other cultivates the relationships and policies that reduce their necessity. We need generals and conscientious objectors, because both are courageous warriors in their own way, fighting for important causes.

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. When the South finally did bring war, Lincoln fought just as hard as Churchill and de Gaulle would generations later. He fought as hard as we must fight.

“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.”

A hero is not someone simply braving the elements, alone. It’s not you against the world. It’s not you angry at the world. It’s about what you’re willing to do for the world.

That’s the flip side of what about me. That’s how we rise above our limits.

“Happy is the man who can make others better,” Seneca writes, “not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts.”

As his nephew recounted, what “he had begun in a spirit of inquiry he completed as a hero.” Tragically, Pliny did not survive. Fortune may favor the bold, but it offers no guarantee. The only certainty is that if we hesitate at the moment of crisis, we’ll accomplish nothing and save no one.

Six seconds. “Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths,” Kelly later said, “but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty . . . into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.” Don’t let them down.

And yet MacArthur proceeded into the heart of enemy territory, unarmed. As he watched his staff holstering pistols before leaving headquarters for the flight to Tokyo, he had given the order. “Take them off,” he’d said. “If they intend to kill us, sidearms will be useless. And nothing will impress them like a show of absolute fearlessness. If they don’t know they’re licked, this will convince them.”

MacArthur landed and never betrayed a hint of fear or doubt. Every little gesture was deliberate—he ate without checking to see if his food was poisoned, he lifted martial law. He came in peace. He was completely confident.

You must care about the people in your care. You must put them first. You must show them with your actions. Call them to something higher. It was the moment when Martin Luther King Jr. went to jail that his followers saw he was more than just a preacher. He was with them. He risked his life for them. He was one of them. We can’t be afraid or we won’t be able to do what needs to be done. But also, by this fearlessness—willingness to represent the cause, in the flesh, against all dangers—we show everyone else that they’ll be okay as well. The leader risks themselves for us. They step to the front. They make their courage contagious.