BONUS: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Inspiring Lesson on Courage

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, here is a lesson on courage we could all hear today. 📕 Check out the Virtue Series 3-Book Bundle which includes Ryan Holiday’s books: Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and Right Thing, Right Now 📚 Books mentioned: Taylor Branch Trilogy: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/Waging a Good War by Thomas Ricks: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Actually, this is a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast because here in America, it is Martin Luther King Jr. today. And in honor of that, because he is such a pivotal figure in this series on the cardinal virtues I have been doing, it's big character encourages calling, discipline is destiny, and of course, the justice book writing right now. And actually, there was a chapter on taking criticism, which was going to be in the justice book on Martin Luther King, that I just moved to the wisdom book. So I believe he appears in all four books. But in this one, it's one of my favorite chapters. It's called

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  "A Few Seconds of Courage." Like, we tend to think of courage as this sort of big, long thing. I don't know if that makes sense. But like, we think about it as like, a thing you have or you don't have, as opposed to a thing you do. And you do in just a few seconds, right? Just a few seconds of it is what matters. It's starting the process. It's not like many things in life, right? Like, you have to start the run. You have to start the process of standing up to speak up. You have to walk towards the trash to throw away the pack of cigarettes, or whatever. You have to start it. And then, once you get the momentum, it can kind of take care of itself. But in this chapter, I talk about

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  not just Martin Luther King's courage, put himself out there to risk his body. He's arrested, about to be sent to a very notorious southern prison, whereas, as King's being pulled away by this car, he's, he's pretty sure he's going to end up in a ditch somewhere. As people often were then, they would just sort of disappear. You know, being arrested... By the Southern police wasn't, oh, you're risking jail time necessarily. It's you're risking being murdered extrajudicially. And this is a story about Nixon and Kennedy and their campaigns in that 1960 election. And the very different tacks they take towards the news that this civil rights leader

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  being arrested throws in their direction. And so we'll get into all that. I will say on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, if you haven't read Taylor Branch's sort of epic trilogy, I think it's trilogy on the civil rights movement, You Are Missing Out, is an incredible series of books. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And of course, I'll also listen to Courage is Calling. But those three books, I think they're five, 600 pages each, are just insane, insanely good. I'd also recommend Tom Ricks's Waging a Good War, which looks at the civil rights movement as a kind of military campaign, which it was. And then David Halberstam's The Children, also beautiful book. Those are just some of my favorites.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  But anyways, here is a discussion of courage that I think we could all benefit from on Martin Luther King Day. And if you want a signed copy of Courage is Calling, I'll link to that in today's show notes as well.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Just a few seconds of courage.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  On October 19th, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. Was arrested for trying to eat at a restaurant inside Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. With the enemy in custody, Southern authorities seized the opportunity to try and crush King while they had the chance. Holding him on other charges, they denied bail and sent him to the state prison in Reedsville, where he was to be sentenced to four months on a chain gang. There was real worry that King might be beaten or lynched. And so overwhelmed with worry, Coretta Scott King, very pregnant with her third child, called both the Nixon and Kennedy campaigns, who in one of the tightest elections in American history, both desperately needed the black vote.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  Nixon, as it happens, was not only friends with King, but had personally overseen the Eisenhower administration's civil rights efforts. His advisers urged him to act, but Nixon hesitated, weighing the same considerations that had flashed in the mind of Theodore Roosevelt a half-century before. He didn't want to lose the South. He didn't want to wade in the middle of a controversy. He was worried it would seem like grandstanding. And so he betrayed King in that moment and left the door open for Kennedy to call both the governor of Georgia, as well as Coretta, whom he rang directly from an airport to console and reassure. Meanwhile, his brother, Robert Kennedy, called the judge in Alabama

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  and pressured him into releasing King. 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. So 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 35,000 key votes across two key states. Two phone calls had won him the presidency.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  A few seconds of cowardice, the time it would have taken to speak to the wife of a good man wrongly imprisoned, had 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. Do you do it, or are you too scared? It takes just a few seconds to hit "send" on that email, to get those first words out of your mouth, to put your arm in motion to volunteer, to take that first step in the run towards a machine-gun nest, to switch your vote from yes to no, or no to yes, to pick up the phone, as Kennedy did, not even to save King's life, but to comfort the man's wife."

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Once the event is underway, everything else comes naturally, fulfilling your responsibilities, putting one foot in front of the other. You drop out of college, then you throw yourself into your new career. You file the divorce paperwork and begin rebuilding your life. You walk into the office of the SEC to make your complaint. You'll be too busy to be afraid. Momentum starts working for you, not against you. 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 20 seconds of insane courage.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Just literally 20 seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it." Can we really make such a promise? No. Life is not the movies. Results are never certain. You may not succeed, but you do have to try. Because the failure to act, that is a certainty. Those few seconds stick to us like a scarlet letter. "I was afraid" is not an excuse that ages well. When we marvel at people's courage or are intimidated by it, we often miss that it wasn't some enormous planned out thing. It began with a simple decision. It began with a leap.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  "He didn't know it was politically sound," King reflected on Kennedy's decision. But the same was true for King. He didn't know when he embarked on that first bus boycott in Montgomery that it would shape the rest of his life as well as the world. Courage is defined in the moment, in less than a moment, when we decide to step up or step out, 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.