How to Be More Courageous With Stoicism (7 Tips)

Pre-orders are available for Ryan Holiday’s new book "Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave" at https://dailystoic.com/preorderAlmost every religion, spiritual practice, philosophy and person grapples with fear. The most repeated phrase in the Bible is “Be not afraid.” The ancient Greeks spoke of phobos, panic and terror. It is natural to feel fear, the Stoics believed, but it cannot rule you. Courage, then, is the ability to rise above fear, to do what’s right, to do what’s needed, to do what is true. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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 Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, we've got a very special episode. It's me riffing on a theme. Obviously, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about lately courage, because courage is not just one of the four Stoic virtues. It is the first in my Stoic Virtues series. The new book for me, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. So in today's episode, I want to riff on how to have more courage, some ideas about what courage is and what courage is not, how we can apply it, and how we can answer that call. Because if we don't, right? What does a world look like if everyone says, "I'm afraid. Sorry, that's too costly.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  I don't want to risk it. Maybe someone else will do it." That's not a world that any of us want to live in. And in fact, the good parts of the world we have today are here precisely because our ancestors, the people I talk about in the book, that we are descended from, directly, indirectly, spiritually, biologically, they were courageous. We wouldn't be here without the courage of those people. And that's what I mean when I say that courage is calling. So I hope you enjoy today's episode. And remember, you can preorder my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, anywhere books are sold. The audio, physical, you can get it from Amazon, you

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  can get an ebook. And we have a bunch of awesome bonuses from me if you go to dailystoic.com/preorder, including signed copies of the manuscript pages, which I just signed and got all ready to go. And you can also have a dinner with me. That's, that's one of the cool bonuses as well, plus a bunch of other stuff. So check it out, dailystoic.com/preorder. And I hope you answer the call to courage, which is what we're going to talk about now.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  I would challenge you to think of one thing worth accomplishing that does not require courage. Courage is that force that allows us to overcome obstacles, to push through adversity, to rise above our fears.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  There is no greatness that's not rooted in courage. That is a fact. And so the call to courage comes to all of us in life. The question is, are you going to answer it? And if you won't, who will? So in today's episode, I wanted to talk about the role of courage in our lives, how to be more courageous. And I wanted to let you know, you can preorder my new book, Courage is Calling, until September 28 at dailystoic.com/preorder. Then it'll be available everywhere books are sold. It's my first book, the four book series on the four Stoic virtues. I think you're really going to like it. Check it out.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things you realize when you do something scary or big, when you come out of the other side of it, is you realize that you didn't actually need to be so scared. I remember when I was dropping out of college, I thought, if this doesn't work out, my life is over. Then I did it. And I realized, oh, man, I could have gone back to school at any time. This didn't matter at all. So one of the ways to be more courageous is to do courageous things. And actually Aristotle says this, he says, you know, a builder builds things, and that's how you become a builder. To become courageous and brave, you have to do courageous things. You make courage a habit. You take the risks. You force yourself to speak up, to say what you think, to do what other people are afraid to do. And then this is how, in the big moments, in the moments that it really matters, you're able to step

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  forward because it's part of your nature. It's become who you are. It's the default that you have. So the idea is that courage is calling. It's always there. The question is, are you brave enough to answer?

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  One of the most poorly understood concepts in the world is agency. Agency is your sense or your ability to create change, to control your own destiny. At the essence of Stoicism is a belief in one's agency. Yes, there's all the things that we don't control that are not up to us, but the things that are up to us, that's where our agency is, that's where we focus on. We have the courage to embrace our own agency, the Stoics say. Marcus Aurelius says, "If it's humanly possible, know that you can do it." You have to believe that you have the ability to change things, that you have the ability to control the direction of your life, that you have the ability to improve, to grow, to change, to learn.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  Because if you don't believe that, why the hell are you even waking up in the morning? There's a Hebrew saying that I love. It's from the 1800s, but it goes, "The world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is to not be afraid." The point is, when you're walking on a narrow balance beam or a narrow bridge, the one thing you can't do is be scared, because it'll mess you up and you'll fall. And I think that's sort of the predicament we're in. It's not fair, nobody chose it, it's not our fault, but you've got to cross this bridge now, and this fear. But courage is going to be important, right? And that's one of those sort of core Stoic virtues. Theodore Roosevelt considers inviting Booker T.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  Washington to the White House, the first black man to ever be allowed to dine as a guest at the White House. But he hesitates. He hesitates because he thinks for a second about the political consequences, he thinks about the controversy, he thinks about the backlash, he thinks even about some of his own southern relatives. But then Theodore Roosevelt writes that precisely because he hesitated, he felt ashamed and he knew that he had to do it. And I think there's something about hesitation that is showing us that this is actually precisely the thing that we need to do. When the Stoics talk about courage, when they talk about this idea that courage is calling, we should expect that sometimes we're going to hesitate, sometimes we're going to let it ring a few times. But it's precisely when we are most hesitant, when we are afraid, that we are getting really

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  strong, important information that this is precisely the thing that we should do, and that this is precisely the direction that we should go.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  If there is one excuse that does not age well, it's "I was afraid. I was worried about me. I didn't want to be affected." This is why for the Stoics, courage is such an essential virtue. You can't be afraid. There's a reason that the most repeated phrase in the Bible is "be not afraid." It also appears in the Odyssey like a dozen times too. You can't be afraid. You have to face what you're afraid of. Fear, like any other emotion to the Stoics, is something you work through. You work through it with logic, with strength, with perseverance. You have to decide who's in charge: your fear or you? Your rational mind or your emotional mind? You have to understand, being afraid is not something people are going to accept in the future,

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  which is why you have to be courageous.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  The one thing Socrates said that he knew for certain was that we cannot remain as we are. Meaning, we have to change. We can always improve. We have to grow. Marcus really says to keep on being the person you've been is like being a chewed-up, torn-up gladiator in the games, just begging to come back tomorrow, despite the fact that they're losing, despite the fact that it's not working. It takes courage to change, to admit that you have a problem, to focus on where you can grow, to focus on where you can need to be made better. So courage isn't just running into battle, or a burning building, or being a whistleblower. It's also looking yourself in the mirror, seeing where you have problems, seeing where you can be made better, and then focusing on getting better there,

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  on embracing change, being brave enough to do that.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  You can't be a coward. You just cannot be a coward. The first virtue for the Stoics is courage. It's the virtue on which all the other virtues depend. Doing the right thing requires courage. What is the point of wisdom if it's not to give you insight as to what to be courageous about? So you could be brave, so you could go out and be fearless in whatever it is that you do. And whatever it is that you do, I promise you, it will be better the less motivated, the less informed by fear that you are.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  My newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, is now available for preorder. We've got a bunch of amazing bonuses. You can get signed copies, of course. I'm so proud of this book. General Jim Mattis has called it "a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life." Matthew McConaughey called it "an urgent call to arms to each and all of us." I do hope you check it out. It's my first in the Four Virtues series: Courage, Temperance, Justice, Wisdom. Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. If you want to preorder it, I'd really appreciate your support. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder.