Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave

It doesn’t matter who or how many come at you, you have to be you. Confidently. Authentically. Bravely.

One way to remember who you are,” he said, “is to remember who your heroes are.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life,” Joan Didion observed, “is the source from which self-respect springs.

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.

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?

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values. Viktor Frankl

One man with courage makes a majority.

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.

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.

It has been said that a Stoic is someone who says “Fuck you” to fate. That’s right. They resist. They fight. They will not be made to do the wrong thing. Especially under pressure.

For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. We all face this choice.

The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.

It is almost offensively clichéd now to use the phrase “Freedom isn’t free.” Nonetheless, it is true.

Longfellow wrote: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

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. They definitely weren’t willing to say so. Because no one said anything, no one did anything except tell Hitler what he wanted to hear. And so they all became complicit. Still,

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.

History is written with blood, sweat, and tears, and it is etched into eternity by the quiet endurance of courageous people.

If it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth in it.

Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be.

You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t.

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.

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.

Courage has clear rewards. One takes a risk because they hope for a payoff—something others are afraid to reach for. But what about sacrificing oneself? Or sacrificing deeply for something? There’s courage and then there is heroism, the highest form of courage. The kind embodied in those who are willing to give, perhaps give everything, for someone else.

Be scared. You can’t help that,” William Faulkner put it. “But don’t be afraid.

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.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. William Ernest Henley

Courage is risk. It is sacrifice . . . . . . commitment . . . perseverance . . . truth . . . determination.