Courage Is Calling: Timeless Stoic values from the multimillion-selling author of THE DAILY STOIC

by Ryan Holiday

Let us not wait for other people to come to us and call upon us to do great deeds. Let us instead be the first to summon the rest to the path of honor. Show yourself to be the bravest of all the captains, with more of a right to leadership than those who are our leaders at present. XENOPHON

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. Was this real? Did it really

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

It’s long been held that there are two kinds of courage, physical and moral.

In an ugly world, courage is beautiful. It allows beautiful things to exist. Who says it has to be so rare? You picked up this book because you know it doesn’t.

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?

Tell

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.

You’re overestimating them … and they’re overestimating you.

You think the job interviewer wants to be doing this? That they get off on asking you these questions? No, they are scared of screwing up too. The gruff director your first day on set, the drill sergeant with a fresh batch of green recruits, the front office executive negotiating your contract—their aura of certainty is an illusion. They’re just as nervous as anybody else. They’re pretending too. And when you get up close, you’ll find the mismatch is hardly as great as you expected. A little awareness, a little empathy, it doesn’t make us soft. It gives us confidence. Now we see what’s really there. Now everyone else is more scared than we are.

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.”

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? You think it’d be better if things were easy. You wish you didn’t have to take this risk. If only the leap didn’t look so damn dangerous. That’s just the fear talking. It’s good that it’s hard. It deters the cowards and it intrigues the courageous. Right?

On the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s first spacewalk, his left eye went blind. His right eye teared up and froze too. He was plunged into complete darkness, teetering on the edge of an abyss of even more darkness. He would later say the key to such situations is to remind oneself, “There are six things that I could do right now, all of which will help make things better.” And while it is worth remembering that, as he said, “there’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse also.” We can’t forget that all the energy we spend fearing that we’ll make it worse is energy not spent making it better. Whether it’s six things or five—or sixty-five—the point is, what’s in front of you is what matters. The sooner the better, as Demosthenes said.

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.

It’s very easy to judge. It’s very hard to know.

There is a story about Nikita Khrushchev after he became premier of the Soviet Union. Onstage, speaking to the Politburo, he denounced the crimes of Stalin’s regime. Anonymously, some unnamed member passed a note to the front of the room. “Yes,” it said, “but where were you at the time?”

Khrushchev struggled to answer, paused, and then replied, “I was where you are now.” Meaning, in the audience. Anonymous. Doing nothing. Just like everyone else.

Waste not a second questioning another man’s courage. Put that scrutiny solely on your own.

“What is going to happen to me?” And the other that said, “What action am I going to take?”

“Never think that you are impotent. Choose how you respond.”

“Courage is in shorter supply than genius,”

“But what’s in it for me?” or “But what will happen to my access if I speak out?” are the wrong questions. Instead, what 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. 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.” And eventually he was banished; he was kicked out of the parlor, and later executed. He lost his job. He lost his life. Those two things we fear losing most. But while he had those things, he actually used them.

When you sign your name, you put your ass on the line.

Can’t lose if you don’t choose? Of course you can. You lose the moment. You lose the momentum. You lose your ability to look yourself in the mirror.

You’re a fool if you think staying on the good side of bad people is a safe bet. The future you seem to be willing to defer anything to ensure? Nothing can guarantee it. This moment, the present you’re neglecting—whether it’s an opportunity to do something risky and fun, or the call to do something harrowing but right—is all you have.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “Feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

“nothing is lost while courage remains.”

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

you don’t want to flinch when it comes, Seneca would say around the same time, train before it comes.

Know-how is a help. But it’s preparation that makes you brave.

always wanted to go for the hard problems, the ambitious projects. Fortune favors the bold, right?

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.

Isn’t that how we solve big problems? By breaking them down? By focusing on the piece in front of us? Ideally, early on, before it gets harder or buried in other problems? (Rivers are more easily forded at their source, goes the expression.) Build some momentum, some confidence as you begin crossing stuff off the list. And most of all, isn’t this what training helps you with? Telling you the first and smallest thing you should do—what your job in this moment happens to be.

And so they all became complicit.

We need people to challenge the status quo. We need artists who probe personal issues … and make public critiques. We need politicians who insist on leading from a place of honesty, and they themselves need expert advisers who do not hesitate to tell them unpleasant facts. We need a population that refuses to tolerate propaganda, rationalizations, or cover-ups. People in every station who are willing to stand up and say, “This is not right. I won’t be a part of it.” We need you to say that.

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

But that was only part of it. Truman and Marshall knew they would be criticized. They knew that each decision was a risk. They knew that the buck stopped with them—that their name would be on the decision, literally in the case of the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan.

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

You can’t beat a problem by debating it, only by deciding what you’re going to do about it and then doing it. Not a decision for decision’s sake, of course, but the right call, right now. And if your decision happens to be wrong, or you make a mistake, then decide again, with the same kind of courage and clarity.

She was the Iron Lady. Just like Serpico and de Gaulle and Lewis and Nightingale, she couldn’t have been anything else. They were called to be who they were, and they had the courage to insist upon answering.

Just a Few Seconds of Courage

King immediately made it known who had been there for him when he needed it, even though he had planned to vote for Nixon. “I had known Nixon longer,” he recalled, and “he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me.

this is why I really considered him a moral coward and one who was really unwilling to take a courageous step and take a risk.” Kennedy went on to win the election two weeks later by less than half a percentage point—just thirty-five thousand key votes across two key states. Two phone calls had won him the presidency. A few seconds of cowardice, the time it would have taken to speak with the wife of a good man wrongly imprisoned, cost Nixon the office.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what your track record is. What matters is the moment—sometimes even less than a moment. D...

There is a great line, in the screenplay written by Cameron Crowe and Matt Damon for the movie We Bought a Zoo, based on the true story of a British writer who did exactly that. “You know,” Matt Damon’s character says to his young son, “sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

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.

“A sincere desire to engage the enemy.”

Whatever it is, whatever you’re doing, you must pursue it aggressively.