8 Ways To Make Courage A Habit (From The Stoics)

The world wants to know what category to put you in, which is why it will occasionally send difficult situations your way. Think of these not as inconveniences or even tragedies but as opportunities, as questions to answers. "Am I brave? Am I going to face this problem or run away from it? Will I stand up or be rolled over?"Have you gotten a copy of Ryan Holiday's new book Courage Is Calling? Pick up a signed edition in the Daily Stoic Store - https://dailystoic.com/courageiscalling - or grab it on Amazon - https://geni.us/rW8veQLet your actions etch a response into the record—and let them remind you of why courage is the most important thing. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow 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.

• 0:06Ryan 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,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've been, like, seriously, thank you to everyone who supported Courage is Calling. It's been an incredible experience. I was in the depths of writing what's the second book in this virtue series when Courage came out. And in some ways, putting out the book was a huge distraction. It took me away from the routine, took up hours and hours of time doing the interviews and signing the books and writing the articles and all of that. But then also just hearing from so many people who have read the book and then seeing the response of all of you. It's really been incredible and inspiring.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  It gave me a boost to get over the finish line on this book that I'm now trying to finish right here at the end of the year, to get into the editor, so I can take a break from it, relax, reset. But I wanted to bring you an episode today about some of the ideas in that book. I think we all know courage is important. I think we all look at our lives and wish there was more courage in it. I think the things that we're most proud of were in some way related to courage. And I think the things that we regret the most, certainly the things I'm most ashamed of, where I feel like I really screwed up deficient. Ignency of courage was also present. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about some Stoic practices, some Stoic exercises to help make courage a habit,

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  to help bring courage into our lives, to help us step up when things get difficult, scary, worrisome, weird, whatever it is, right? Tempting, unconventional, right? All these different situations in life that demand either physical courage or moral courage, or some combination of the two. You know, when, when life is asking you, are you going to be brave? When, when life is presenting you a challenge and you have to ask yourselves, am I going to be brave? Am I going to face this problem? Or am I going to run from it? Will I stand up or be rolled over? Will I be who I am? Or will I be what other people are trying to make me?

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  The idea is that our actions should be the answer to this question. The Stoics say deeds, not words, of course. And so, of course, while I just wrote this book Courage is Calling, I'm trying to actively be more courageous in my life. That's the journey I've been on. I know that's the journey many of you are on. So here are eight ways to make courage a habit. Check out the book anywhere books are sold. You can pick up signed copies at The Painted Porch or at store.dailystoic.com. And seriously, thank you to everyone who helped make the book a debut New York Times bestseller. Thank you to everyone who bought it as a gift for someone. Thank you to people who have assigned it to your teams or your friends or given it to your kids. It means the world to me. And I hope you like it and we'll talk soon.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  There were things happening then and there's things happening now that you could be involved in, that you could make a difference, that you can make a positive contribution, that you could be heroic about if you choose. But the problem is we choose not to see it. We choose to wait for a better opportunity.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  A prisoner in a Soviet gulag said, "It's not about good and evil." His name was Varlam Shamalov. And he said, "It's not good and evil." He said, "It's cowards and non-cowards." And he said, "Cowards, 95% of the time, are capable of the most vile things you can imagine." So that's really the question. It's not, "Are you good or bad? Are you strong or weak? Are you a coward? Or are you courageous? Do you do the right thing? Do you speak up? Are you committed to your principles? Or do you do what's expedient? Do you do what's easiest?" That's the idea in Courage is Calling. Fortune favors the brave. Are you brave? Do you do the right thing? Do you believe in something? That's really, I think, the thing. Cowards don't believe in anything but themselves. They don't believe in anything but getting ahead.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  They don't believe in anything but their own self-interest. And that's why they're so damn dangerous.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  There's a story I tell about Margaret Thatcher in the new book Courage is Calling. She's a young woman. She's an aspiring chemist. And she's being interviewed at this big company. And she can see on the interviewer's paper across the table from her, and she can read this upside down. He's written, "This woman is much too difficult to work here." And you could see how that could just suck the life, suck the ambition out of a person. It could make you doubt yourself and who you are. But this is why courage is so important. We have to have the courage to be ourselves, to not let things or life change us. Agrippas, one of the early Stoics, talks about how he wants to be the red thread in a garment, the one that pops out. He doesn't want to be like everyone else. And neither should you. You have to have the courage to be who you are, to not be changed, to not be beaten down

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  by the status quo, by conventional wisdom, by how everyone else thinks and acts. You have to have the courage to be yourself.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  People don't know this, but John F. Kennedy very nearly lost the 1960 presidential election. In fact, he won by only about a half a percentage point. And in the end, it came down to about 30, 35,000 votes. So what happened? Martin Luther King was arrested right before the election on trumped-up charges and sentenced to four months on a prison chain gang. And his wife was actually very worried that he would be lynched or murdered in prison. And so she called both the Nixon campaign and the Kennedy campaign. Nixon, who was actually friends with Martin Luther King, decided not to get involved. He didn't want to piss off southern voters. John F. Kennedy called the judge, called Coretta Scott King, and his brother also worked to get Martin Luther King released. And Martin Luther King would say after that he was stunned by this because Nixon had been his friend, and he said,

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  "I always regarded Nixon as a moral coward," after that. And it was the news of this that rallied the black community to vote for John F. Kennedy in the election, and won it. It's really just a few seconds of courage that win Kennedy the election and lose Nixon the election. And I talk about this in Courage is Calling. You know, we think bravery is this big thing, but it's really a very small thing. It's an immediate thing. It was a call to Martin Luther King's wife. It was a call to a judge. It was the decision to get involved, to ignore the reservations. Marx really says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter." You do the right thing, and you trust that doing the right thing will pay off. You also trust in your ability to survive, even if people don't appreciate that you did the right thing. And courage is always better than cowardice.

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  Florence Nightingale is 16 years old when she first gets what she refers to now as "the call." It was calling her to something. She wasn't sure exactly, but she came to believe that this was nursing, helping wounded veterans of war. But one of the main reasons she doesn't pursue this call is she's scared of what her parents will think. They'd sooner she become a prostitute than a nurse. But eight years later, she waits for eight years. She gets the call again. And this time, the call says, "You're gonna let what other people think get in the way of answering my call?" This time, she realizes that, no, she has to do it. But it's still, it takes her another 18 years. The courage was calling, but she declines it for 16 years. But eventually, she's brave enough to do it. She plunges into this field. Just a few months after she answers the call,

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  she's in a hospital in the Crimea, revolutionizing nursing. So we all get the call. The question is, how soon are we gonna answer it? Are we gonna be brave enough to answer it? And are we going to let other things get in the way of the call that's calling us to whom we're meant to be?

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  There was a Spartan general who's marching through Greece and as he would come to each nation, he would send emissaries to say, "Friend or foe? Are you gonna let us march peacefully or we're gonna need to treat this as hostile territory?" Almost all of the answers came back, "Friend, friend, friend." But one king hesitated. He wanted more time to think about it and he kept deliberating and he wouldn't come back with an answer. And finally, the Spartan king said, "Let him keep thinking about it. We'll keep marching on." Emerson said, "You cannot spend the day in deliberation." George Marshall said, "Don't fight the problem. Decide the problem." You have to have the courage to decide, to make the decision, to make your choice, and then to get moving on the most important part, which is execution.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  Courage is calling. Make your decision. Decide what you're gonna do. And then what? The Stoics say, "Do it. Do it as if it's the last thing you're doing in your life. Do it as if you're fully committed to it, because you are fully committed to it and you know how much it matters, because you made the decision."

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Churchill was talking about a man in the Victorian periods. He said, "It was a sad period when great men lived in a time of small events," meaning there wasn't historic major things that they could take over. But this is actually completely wrong. Slavery still existed in these times. Working conditions were horrible. Wars were fought for no good reason. We now have this concept, "Moral luck," right? Sometimes, yeah, you're there during the Blitz, or you're there during the Civil War, or you're there when someone falls into a river and you could save their life, right? There's a certain amount of luck, the opportunity to be heroic. But we also make our own luck. There were things happening then, and there's things happening now that you could be involved in, that you could make a difference, that

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  you could make a positive contribution, that you could be heroic about, if you choose. But the problem is, we choose not to see it. We choose to wait for a better opportunity and we neglect what's in front of us right now. We neglect the small events that could actually be great events. We chose to make them that way. Courage is calling. That's the idea. It's always there. It doesn't matter who you are, what your resources are. It doesn't matter when you live, what era you're in. You always have the opportunity to be heroic, to be great. That's what the Stoics would say.

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  Paul Kicks wrote this great book about the French Resistance and this sort of singular figure in the French Resistance. I remember I was talking to him about it because I had him on my podcast and he said something like, "What percentage of France do you think was involved in the French Resistance?" And I was like, "I don't know, like 20%, 30%?" Like, imagine, it's not like, "Oh hey, there's this cause, I'm not sure." The Nazis take over your country. And like, 5% of France was like, "This is bad, we should not go along with this." We had this idea in retrospect that like, everyone was on the same page. Everyone is heroic. Everyone had courage. But it's like, demonstrably not the case. And this is true, you know, like, Martin Luther King wasn't a hero. Like, we killed

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  Martin Luther King. He was deeply unpopular. It was a small minority of people who saw, then, what we now perceive today and agree upon. You know, this will be the same for Colin Kaepernick. For most of these causes, we have to remember, they are deeply unpopular. During their time, yeah, during their time. And, and de Gaulle was asked, you know, "Weren't you alone in all the stands that you took?" And he says something like, "Yes, but I knew that one day that would cease to be so." And to me, that's what courage is. The willingness to stand alone and hold out the hope that you can rally people around you and make a thing of this. Right. And the theme that emerges from this is the idea of like, one courageous

• 12:11Ryan Holiday?

  person can create that majority. Yeah, "One man with courage makes the majority," is what the saying is. And it's true. Like, almost everything that we now hold to be true was disruptive or controversial or persecuted. And it's, I mean, we didn't throw Galileo a parade. Right.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  You can't be a coward. You just cannot be a coward. The first virtue for the Stokes is courage. It's the virtue on which all the other virtues depend. Doing the right thing requires courage, right? What is the point of wisdom if it's not to give you insight as to what to be courageous about? You think it's easy to be temperate in a time of excess? No, even that requires courage. ...courage. For the Stoics, courage was the whole thing. The philosophy, it's not this pen and ink thing. It's not these books and ideas. That's a part of it. But the purpose of Stoicism was to give you courage. 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.

• 13:22Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.