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

by Ryan Holiday

in the so-called Hero’s Journey, the “call to adventure” is followed in almost all cases by what? The refusal of the call. Because it’s too hard, too scary, because they must obviously have picked the wrong person. That’s the conversation Nightingale had with herself, not for a little while but for sixteen years. Fear does this. It keeps us from our destiny. It holds us back. It freezes us. It gives us a million reasons why. Or why not.

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear,” Nightingale would later write. A good chunk of the first three decades of her life had been proof. But she also knew that there had been a brief moment where she had once not been afraid. She needed to seize that power inside herself again, to break out on her own and accept the call she had been given to hear. It was a terrifying leap. Walking away from a life of ease. Flouting convention. The chorus of doubts and demands. Of course this had held her back—it holds so many of us back.

she wrote of her decision to break free. “I must take some things, as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must take them, they will not be given to me.”

What we are to do in this life comes from somewhere beyond us; it’s bigger than us. We are each called to be something. We are selected. We are chosen . . . but will we choose to accept this? Or will we run away? That is our call.

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.

when a doctor—or anyone—told her that something could not be done, she replied with quiet authority, “But it must be done.”

Today, each of us receives our own call. To service. To take a risk. To challenge the status quo. To run toward while others run away. To rise above our station. To do what people say is impossible. There will be so many reasons why this will feel like the wrong thing to do. There will be incredible pressure to put these thoughts, these dreams, this need, out of our mind. Depending on where we are and what we seek to do, the resistance we face may be simple incentives . . . or outright violence. Fear will make itself felt. It always does. Will we let it prevent us from answering the call? Will we leave the phone ringing? Or will we inch ourselves closer and closer, as Nightingale did, steeling ourselves, preparing ourselves, until we’re ready to do what we were put here to do?

almost everything new, everything impressive, everything right, was done over the loud objections of the status quo. Most of what is beloved now was looked down on at the time of its creation or adoption by people who now pretend that never happened. We often lack the ability or the willingness to see that their objections are just a hump that must be gotten over.

People would rather be complicit in a crime than speak up. People would rather die in a pandemic than be the only one in a mask. People would rather stay in a job they hate than explain why they quit to do something less certain. They’d rather follow a silly trend than dare question it; losing their life savings to a burst bubble is somehow less painful than seeming stupid for sitting on the sidelines while the bubble grew. They’d rather go along with something that will tarnish their legacy than raise their voice ever so slightly and risk standing alone or apart for even ten minutes.

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.

The entrepreneur and writer Tim Ferriss has spoken of the exercise of “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.

Several times a day, Napoleon believed a commander should ask themselves, “What if the enemy were to appear now to my front, or on my right, or on my left?” We can imagine that the point of this exercise was not to make his generals anxious. No, it was to make sure they were prepared.

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.

The whole point is that it’s hard. The risk is a feature, not a bug. Nec aspera terrent. Don’t be frightened by difficulties. Be like the athlete, knowing what a hard workout gives you: stronger muscles. “There is no better than adversity,” Malcolm X would say. “Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.” How could you possibly trust yourself if you had not been through harder things than this? How could you possibly believe that you might be able to survive this if you had not survived other things before?

We all need adversaries and adversity to exist. “Plenty and peace breed cowards,” Shakespeare said. “Hardness ever of hardiness is mother.” It’s not bad that this is happening to you. It’s good training. Besides, not everyone would even have the strength to see it that way. This moment is a test. They’re called “trying times” for a reason. It’s good that it’s happening now, instead of later—because later, you’ll be better for having gone through it today. Got it?

Apply yourself to thinking through difficulties—hard times can be softened, tight squeezes widened, and heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure.

Don’t bother with “What would I do in their shoes?” Ask: “What am I doing now?” In your own life. With your own fears. People are going to break. You have to understand this. People are going to struggle. 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.

about you? What are you doing? If we are going to indict anyone for their cowardice, let it be silently, by example. Waste not a second questioning another man’s courage. Put that scrutiny solely on your own.

whether you’re a billionaire or an ordinary person, no matter how physically tough or brilliant you are. Fear determines what is or isn’t possible. If you think something is too scary, it’s too scary for you. If you don’t think you have any power . . . you don’t. If you aren’t the captain of your fate . . . then fate is the captain of you. We go through life in two ways. We choose between effective truths: that we have the ability to change our situation, or that we are at the mercy of the situations in which we find ourselves. We can rely on luck . . . or cause and effect.

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?”

General James Mattis reminded his troops of the same thing: “Never think that you are impotent. Choose how you respond.”

Scholars remind us that the opposite of andreia—the ancient Greek word for “courage”—is not cowardice. It’s melancholia. Courage is honest commitment to noble ideals. The opposite of courage is not, as some argue, being afraid. It’s apathy. It’s disenchantment. It’s despair. It’s throwing up your hands and saying, “What’s the point anyway?”

We want to live in a world of brave people, we want to be brave . . . and we’re afraid to talk about it because we might look foolish! The brave don’t despair. They believe. They are not cynical, they care. They think there is stuff worth dying for—that good and evil exist. They know that life has problems but would rather be part of the solution than a bystander. “Life is real! Life is earnest!” Longfellow writes in his famous psalm. But to even say that—let alone believe it—requires a kind of courage.

we must be strong enough to ask is, “But what if everyone acted this way?” “What if everyone put their own interests above everything else?” “What if everyone was afraid?” What kind of world would that be? Not a good one. Certainly not a safe one.

In the fable “The Golden Key,” the Old Man of the Earth shows a young boy the reality of the world, that there is no progress without risk. Moving an enormous stone from the floor of the cave, he shows the boy a hole that seems to go on forever. “That is the way,” he says. “But there are no stairs,” the boy replies. “You must throw yourself in,” he’s told. “There is no other way.” It’s scary, but there’s no way around it.

All growth is a leap in the dark. If you’re afraid of that, you’ll never do anything worthwhile. If you take counsel of your fears, you’ll never take that step, make that leap. The times we could have said something. The bets we should have placed. The people we might have met. The lessons that would have been learned. The battles that were never won. What if there was certainty, if there was a well-lit, well-defined path? If life were like this, no courage would be required.

No one can tell you that your plan will succeed. No one can tell you what their answer to your question will be. No one can guarantee you’ll make it home alive. They can’t even tell you how far down the hole goes. If they could, if it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. And then it wouldn’t need to be done by you, now would it? The coward waits for the stairs that will never come. They want to know the probabilities. They want time to prepare. They want assurances. They hope for a reprieve. They’re willing to give up anything to get these things, including this moment of opportunity that will never, ever come back.

We like to think we can have an extraordinary life by making ordinary decisions, but it’s not true. It’s actually all the ordinary decisions—the safe ones, recommended by every expert, criticized by no one—that make us incredibly vulnerable in times of chaos and crisis.

All certainty is uncertain. You’re not safe. You never will be. No one is. In putting safety above everything, we actually put ourselves in danger. Of being forgotten. Of never coming close. Of being complicit. How will you handle the danger? “What will happen to me?” No one can tell you that. But with courage, you can say yourself, “I’m not sure, but I will get through it with my soul intact. I will make the best of it. I will not be afraid.”

Eleanor, later talked about doing the thing you cannot do. It is almost always the thing you should do. When something tells you that you’re not allowed. When someone tells you that you’ll regret your decision. When the pit in your stomach makes you hesitate. But what will our customers think? But what if our competitors use this against us? What if it doesn’t work? Will people be mad at me? Damn them all. Decide to testify. Decide to go all in on the new venture. Take the creative risk. Decide to answer the reporter’s email. Decide to say what you’re hesitant to say. They say not to take counsel of your fears, but perhaps that’s exactly what we should do. We should listen closely and then do the opposite.

We don’t need to buck the crowd on every single little thing. We don’t need to be different for the sake of being different—petulant rebellion can be its own kind of defense mechanism. But if we do, on the outside, look the same as everyone else, we better make damn sure that on the inside everything is different. That we are truly who we want to be, how we know deep down it feels right to be. 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.

make sure that underneath, you are being yourself. That you are not letting fear shut you up or put you down. That you are not doing what everyone else is doing simply because they are doing it. Be original. Be yourself.

Don’t let the opinion of cowards influence what you think or do. The future depends on it.

You have to be willing not only to step away from the herd but get up in front of them and say what you truly think or feel. It’s called “public life” for a reason. We don’t get to succeed privately.

When we flee in the direction of comfort, of raising no eyebrows, of standing in the back of the room instead of the front, what we are fleeing is opportunity. When we defer to fear, when we let it decide what we will and won’t do, we miss so much. Not just success, but actualization. Who might we be if we didn’t care about blushing? What could we accomplish if we didn’t mind the spotlight?

The unfailingly cheerful know how much other people look to them for humor and hope. But do these people know that they can ask for help too? Do you know that? Or are you afraid? Historically, the Stoics were strong. And brave. And did their duty—without complaint, without hesitation. With courage, they carried the load, and willingly did so for others when it was necessary. But it’s a mistake to assume that they were somehow superhuman, that they never struggled, never wavered, never needed for anything. They had to—as we all do—ask for help when they needed it. And they were not afraid to do it, either. Because sometimes that’s the strongest and bravest thing to do. “Don’t be ashamed to need help,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” Exactly. So what?

You’re looking for a hand, not a handout. You’re looking for advice. You’re not looking to be exempted. You’re getting your wounds treated so you can get back into the fight. You’re speaking up not for pity or attention but so the same thing doesn’t happen to someone else. You’re not looking to get an unfair advantage. You’re taking advantage of the opportunities and the protections that were designed for precisely the situation you’re in.

When the student asks a question, what happens? They learn something they didn’t know. When the friend reveals a vulnerability to another, what happens? The friendship gets stronger. When the employee admits the workload is too much, what happens? A hire is made and the company gets more efficient. When somebody has the courage to speak about something shameful that was done to them? Society is propelled into action. Someone can help them stop it. Sometimes just the ask itself is a breakthrough. The admission unlocks something within. Now we’re powerful enough to solve our problem.

It’s okay to need a minute. It’s okay to need a helping hand. To need reassurance, a favor, forgiveness, whatever. Need therapy? Go! Need to start over? Okay! Need to steady yourself on someone’s shoulder? Of course! You won’t get any of this if you don’t ask. You won’t get what you’re afraid to admit you need. So ask now, right now, while you have the courage. Before it’s too late.

Courage is the management of and the triumph over fear. It’s the decision—in a moment of peril, or day in and day out—to take ownership, to assert agency, over a situation, over yourself, over the fate that everyone else has resigned themselves to. 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? Every hero faces this choice. Our discrimen—the critical turning point. The moment of truth. Will you be brave? Will you put yourself out there? What will you reveal your character to be? 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.

“When events become grave, and peril pressing,” de Gaulle had written in the 1920s, “a sort of tidal wave pushes men of character into the front rank.” Now the events for him were grave and pressing, just as they might be for you. He was ready to answer the call. More, he was putting out the call, to anyone and everyone who was willing to join him. Some people run away. Some people stand up. It’s that simple.

This was what made de Gaulle so glorious: He made no promises—only demands. It was your duty to resist, he said. We are being called by a higher power, to a higher cause. We must free ourselves. In the end, some four hundred thousand French men and women joined this resistance, blowing up bridges, gathering intelligence, sabotaging their occupiers, saving people from the camps, picking off the enemy one by one, weakening them in advance of the Allied invasion.

That is the thing about courage: Just like fear, it is contagious. It was de Gaulle’s commitment, his undauntedness, that rallied not just France but the whole world behind him.

He was on the Hero’s Journey. He was answering the same call that his ancestors had answered, that you yourself have the opportunity to answer—if you refuse to be afraid, if you seize your destiny.

Courage may call for us to stand alone, alone against the incredible adversity, even against what feels like the entire world. But we are not afraid, because we are not actually alone when we take that stand. For behind us, as there was for de Gaulle, there is a great empire. And we must know that if we fight hard and long enough, we will find everyone is with us.

Are you one of the cowards? Are you someone we can count on? Do you have what it takes? Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced misfortune. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” That’s why this question is so important. The world wants to know what category to put you in, so it sends difficult situations your way.

Do I have a spine? Am I brave? Am I going to face this problem or run away from it? Will I stand up or be rolled over? You answer this question not with words but with actions. Not privately but publicly.

We each receive our call. If we don’t answer it, then we deprive the world of something. Our failure of courage ripples out beyond us, into the lives of other people. Because if you don’t adopt that kid, who will? If you don’t start that business, who will? If you don’t finally say those three magic words today, when will you? Likely no one, likely never. And if someone does, it won’t be you—it will be different. It will not be as good. It will not be what you bring to the table. The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.

Start small . . . on something big. Eliminate one problem. Move things one iota. Write one sentence. Send one letter. Make a spark.

The Greek word for this kind of courage was parrhesia. It was the speaking of truth to power. It was refusing to buy the lie or to play it false. Socrates was the classic parrhesiastes, a man who said what others were afraid to say to the people they were afraid to say it to. To paraphrase an ancient historian: No one could make Socrates do, say, or think anything that was alien to his character.