Live Courageously And Be Brave
Courage is the keystone of greatness. From military victories to artistic triumphs, social activism to entrepreneurship – all that is grand and great is purchased with courage.
But that doesn’t mean courage is some unobtainable virtue – a quality that belongs solely to some moral elite. Courage does lead to great things in life. But it’s also an element of day-to-day existence.
Laying out inspiring examples drawn from both ancient and modern history, this post presents us with a vision of life lived courageously, and call on us to become brave, too.
Courage means willingly facing hardship and danger.
When people talk about courage, they often break it into two different types: moral courage and physical courage.
Moral courage, they say, is the ability to act as your conscience dictates – even if that means defying social norms, or risking scandal and gossip. Whistleblowers and truth tellers exemplify this type of courage. They’re unafraid to rely on their own inner convictions, no matter the consequences.
Physical courage, on the other hand, is demonstrated by soldiers and first responders. It means risking life and limb – putting your body, rather than your reputation, on the line.
Maybe you think it’s a useful distinction. But is it really? At the end of the day, doesn’t courage of all stripes come down to one thing: taking risks, enduring danger, putting yourself in peril?
You’ve surely heard of Hercules. He’s a towering figure, both literally and figuratively, in the myths of ancient Greece. A hard-living and rugged warrior, it’s easy to imagine him living on the spur of the moment, romping through life in pursuit of each minute’s appetites and whims.
But nothing could be further from the truth. You see, Hercules willingly chose to endure hardship. Presented with two options – a risk-free life of ease and a risky life of virtue – he made the courageous choice. He embraced risk and struggle, and spent his life pursuing virtue.
In the legend, the choice was stark. Hercules, then only a young man, came to a shaded crossroads in the hills of Greece. The road diverged – and along each path stood a woman, each quite unlike the other.
One was a beautiful goddess, luxuriously robed. She enticed him with promises of ease, pleasure, and untroubled peace. If he followed her, she assured him, he would never experience pain, hardship, or deprivation: his life would be a dream, his every wish satisfied.
The other woman promised something very different. She too was a goddess, but she was dressed very plainly. She didn’t entice or allure, and she offered a life a good deal less tempting. Not a life of pleasure, but one of struggle. Not a life of ease, but one of hard work.
But for all the deprivation and danger Hercules would face, all the threats and terrors, he would also gain something: not pleasure, not ease, but glory – the reward for living life against the odds, for courageously choosing to pursue virtue.
Hercules hesitated briefly – and then he chose the thorny but virtuous path, the one that has kept his name alive for eons. You might hesitate, too – but would you choose what Hercules chose?
Logic can help you overcome your fears.
What is it that stops us from being courageous? What’s the one thing that makes cowards of us all? In a word, it’s fear – phobos, in ancient Greek. Fear is the enemy of courage – but it’s also the thing that makes courage possible in the first place.
After all, courage doesn’t require immunity to fear. It doesn’t mean that risks and dangers fail to register with us. Courage means overcoming our fears. It means recognizing dangers, but prevailing all the same.
Even the courageous feel fear. What sets them apart is that they move past it. But how? To answer that question, let’s turn to ancient Greece once again.
Pericles was probably the most famous statesman in all of Greek history. A proud Athenian, during his long and varied political career, he was at times entrusted with leading the city’s troops.
On one such occasion, the men he was charged with leading were suddenly struck with terror. The cause? Not a threat of invasion, or dwindling supplies – no, Pericles’s troops were scared by a storm.
What could it mean, this storm? What did it signify, this raging sky and rumbling thunder? The men suspected the tempestuous weather was a bad sign, a terrible portent. But not Pericles. Pericles assembled his men, grabbed two large rocks, and banged them together. Like the thunder, the cracking rocks echoed loudly and ominously.
Pericles didn’t have the scientific knowledge necessary to explain thunder in detail, but he made his point all the same. What was thunder but the noise of winds colliding, like the rocks he cracked together? Couldn’t the men see there was nothing to be afraid of?
The lesson here is simple. When you feel afraid, you should, like Pericles, probe your fears. When exposed to the clear light of a logical and reasoning mind, many threats become less frightening.
Unexamined fears can scare you more than they should. The trick is to explore them and break them down. Some fears might turn out to be justified. But others are no more threatening than clashing rocks or the sound of distant thunder.
Don’t ignore your fears – define them.
Vagueness amplifies fear. When things are precise, you can set limits to them. When you can see something’s edges, when you can perceive its outlines, you can tell how big it is. But when something’s shadowy, nebulous, and undefined, assessing the threat and containing it is much more difficult.
Under the influence of fear, your mind magnifies threats and dangers. It exaggerates, misleads, and misconstrues. But the solution isn’t to stop thinking about your fears. On the contrary, you need to think about them: that’s the only way you can define them, weigh them up, and get a sense of their real magnitude and scale.
In other words, don’t avert your gaze from the things that scare you. That’ll just make them seem even more threatening. Look at your fears long enough to delimit them, to establish their true size.
The writer and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss recommends a process called fear setting, which involves examining and articulating the fears that restrain us in life. It’s a good idea – and it’s actually been around, in one form or another, for much longer than you might think.
The Stoics, a group of philosophers who were active in the days of ancient Greece and Rome, practiced something very similar. Seneca, a Roman stoic philosopher and writer, recommended what he called premeditatio malorum, or premeditation of evils.
Like fear setting, this involves bringing to mind the misfortunes that life could possibly bring your way. By familiarizing yourself with these fears, the thinking goes, you lessen their ability to intimidate you. A blow that you’re not prepared for hurts worst of all, Seneca thought: one you anticipate can only do so much harm.
John D. Rockefeller understood this, and used to regularly probe himself with the line, “Suppose the oil fields gave out?” In other words, what will you do if the foundations of your business empire crumble? Rockefeller kept himself alert and agile with this kind of thinking, and made a fortune during market panics throughout the nineteenth century.
Now, meditating on your fears isn’t guaranteed to turn you into a billionaire – but it might help you stop magnifying those fears, and leave you better equipped to deal with them if they ever arise.
Courage can begin with small steps.
When we picture courageous actions, we often imagine single, grand, and glorious gestures, like a warrior running into a terrifying melee, or an upright citizen refusing to bow before a tyrant.
Sometimes that is what courage looks like. Sometimes it truly is picturesque and magnificent. But not always. Often courage involves smaller, more mundane steps.
Take it from Aristotle, who thought that virtues are things we acquire day by day. We become builders by consistently building, and harpists by consistently playing the harp; so too do we become brave by doing brave things, time after time. You don’t have to start grand – you can start small.
When Florence Nightingale contemplated taking the first steps in her medical career, she was daunted. As an English gentlewoman in the nineteenth century, her life was restricted by inflexible notions of propriety and good conduct: becoming a nurse was considered beneath a woman of her standing.
So, she didn’t begin by telling herself that she was about to revolutionize her field. She didn’t promise herself or her family that she’d become one of the most admired women in British history. Instead, she started small, and committed to working in a hospital for one summer.
And everything else followed from that small, but still courageous, step. As Nightingale herself wrote, “Never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small.” Courage can begin discreetly, even if it becomes audacious in the end.
Still, it’s important that you don’t hesitate for too long. Thomas Edison considered life too short to bother with small things for very long. He always felt drawn to difficult projects, to nuts not easily cracked. But maybe the examples of Edison and Nightingale don’t contradict each other. Maybe they can be reconciled.
Don’t worry if your courageous actions are small actions to begin with. But in order for them to count, make sure they’re small steps in important directions. Nightingale might have begun by working for just one summer, but she was working in the field she’d eventually redefine.
Start small, but make sure the thing you’re starting on can someday be big.
A pivotal act of courage can take less than a minute to perform.
In October, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia. His crime? Being a Black man who tried to eat at a restaurant in one of the city’s department stores.
Now, King was loathed by the southern authorities, so once he was in custody, they seized their chance. They denied him bail, held him on other charges, and sent him to the state prison: there, King was due to be sentenced to four months on a chain gang.
Fearing that her husband would be lynched or beaten, Coretta Scott King made contact with two presidential candidates, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, to see if they could help. It was a famously tight election, and both men needed to win Black voters – but neither wanted to alienate supporters in the south. Would either of them do the courageous thing and provide assistance?
Now, Nixon was friends with King and had overseen civil-rights reforms under President Eisenhower. He had every reason to intervene and help King. But he didn’t.
Instead, it was Kennedy who came to his aid. First, Kennedy called the governor of Georgia, and then he called King’s wife. At the same time, he had his brother Robert Kennedy make a call to the judge in Alabama, putting pressure on him to release King.
And King was finally released. Not only that, but he made it widely known that Kennedy had been there for him when he needed it. The following month, Kennedy won the presidential election by less than half a percentage point, or 35,000 votes across two important states.
A few simple but courageous actions won Kennedy the election. Whereas Nixon abandoned King in his hour of need, Kennedy took a risk and did the right thing – which, in the end, was also the strategic thing.
Nixon could have made the same short phone calls. It would hardly have taken a minute. But instead he gave his rival the perfect opportunity to demonstrate his courage.
Sometimes being courageous might take only 30 seconds of your time. Sometimes it might require a minute or two – the amount of time required to send an email, make a phone call, or say the words “I quit.”
Heroism is courage used for others’ benefit.
We all know the name Martin Luther King: the Baptist minister and civil-rights campaigner is one of the twentieth century’s towering figures. But how many of us know the name Stanley Levinson? Probably just a fraction.
That’s a shame. Stanley Levinson drafted a number of speeches for King; he also organized a number of King’s fundraising campaigns. He was a key figure in helping King achieve the success and prominence that ultimately came his way.
But when JFK caught wind of allegations that Levinson had communist sympathies, he pressured King to cut ties with him. What was Levinson’s response? Well, it wasn’t what you might expect. He didn’t protest or plead his innocence. He didn’t ask King to put friendship first. No. In an act of heroism, he selflessly and quietly chose to leave the movement, rather than tarnishing it by sticking around.
Levinson had the courage to step away from both a cause and a figure he was devoted to, because he knew that his presence would hinder its success. Rather than waiting for King to make an agonizing decision, he acted first and separated himself from King’s civil-rights campaign.
That took courage – but it wasn’t the kind of courage that seeks glory or self-aggrandizement. It was heroism, plain and simple: selfless bravery, demonstrated for the sake of others.
Heroism means making sacrifices for other people. It means being a team player. We all remember the Michael Jordans of the world – those miraculous human beings who claim glory as though it was their destiny.
But for every Michael Jordan, there’s always a Bill Cartwright, too – Michael Jordan’s co-captain, who led the Chicago Bulls to their first three back-to-back championships.
A hero is someone who makes their team better, who makes their teammates stronger and taller. That might mean displaying a contagious sense of fortitude in the face of adversity. Or it might mean inspiring others with your example or your words.
And sometimes it might even mean stepping away from your calling for the greater good, as Stanley Levinson had to do. When courage is this selfless, we call it heroism.
Courage means undergoing hardship voluntarily, and risking your reputation, livelihood, or well-being for the sake of virtue. It doesn’t mean you never experience fear, but it does mean you can manage it: using logic, for example, like Pericles, or simply by imagining and defining your fears, as Seneca advised.
Although the acts of courage that come down to us in history books are often grand and glorious, bravery doesn’t always look like that, certainly not in the beginning. Sometimes, a small step in the right direction is all it takes, or a single email, or a couple of phone calls.
Finally, when courage is pursued for the sake of others, when you make sacrifices for others’ lives and welfare, then it earns that rare, powerful and time-honored title: “heroism.”
Action Plan: Be prepared to wander in the wilderness.
Brave men and women aren’t always welcomed by the societies they live in. Socrates had the courage to overturn the moral convictions of ancient Greece – but he was put to death for it. Seneca was exiled. So was the philosopher Epictetus. Courageous people, people who speak out boldly and honestly, often anger the majority and the authorities of their day, so don’t expect everyone to welcome your courage. Don’t look forward to awards and acclaim, at least not at the start. You might have to endure loneliness first: you might have to wander in the wilderness.
