Courage: the secret weapon, the leading edge, the most admirable of qualities
Courage is the secret weapon.
Courage is the leading edge.
Courage is - as I said to Susan Ní Chríodáin on her Life Beyond the Numbers podcast - one of the most universally admirable, and admired, human qualities.
Almost nothing touches me as quickly and as deeply as acts of courage.
Only, in this moment, can I think of two other things: acts of love, or acts of courage and love.
And perhaps all acts of love are - in reality - acts of courage. They do, after all, require a risk. To truly love is to open the door to tragedy and sorrow.
To love something impermanent is to know that this impermanent thing will one day be gone.
When I sat down to create the Wisdom of David Gemmell, tracking the threads of philosophy throughtout the fantasy novelist's work, there were some ideas that I knew would be there.
One was this: courage isn't an absence of fear. It is acting in the face of it.
There can, therefore, be no courage without fear.
'The coward,' one of Gemmell's character says, 'is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.'
But even there is a contradiction, because courage is simply acting in the face of fear and so, 'only the coward,' says another character, 'is capable of the greatest heroism.'
Years ago, in fairly throwaway remark in a lovely conversation, Meg Lyons, a coaching colleague of mine, recommended a video by Dan Sullivan. It's a profound video, and one of the ones I have shared most often with clients.
In it, Sullivan talks about an idea I'd heard before: that confidence comes after. As my mentor Rich Litvin has said, confidence is a result, not a requirement.
I hadn't known that Dan Sullivan was one of Rich's coaches. Maybe, Rich learned the idea from Sullivan, or maybe they were attracted to working together because of this shared ideal.
Confidence is a result of action, and so should never be used as a requirement to take it.
Sullivan, in the video, explains that so often entrepreneurs want to be confident before, or even want to competent before.
And whilst those things sound like sensible things to want, they are a bind. Because competence, like confidence, comes after.
At some point, we have to do the thing we are not qualified to do. If we only do what we are qualified to do, as Ravikant once said to Tim Ferriss, we will end up pushing brooms around and nothing else.
But most importantly, in Sullivan's video, he explains what comes before.
What comes before the leap, before the trapeze, before the doing of something we are neither confident or competent in, come two more things.
Commitment: I will do this thing. I want to do it.
And courage: the willingness to do the thing despite the fear.
Courage is the secret weapon.
Sullivan's four Cs are a map of the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell's monomyth which describes the stories that touch humans and sustain through generations. The stories of each human's growth and journey to fulfilling their potential.
It requires courage.
Courage is the leading edge.
And we know that, somewhere within us.
It's why we are brought to tears by the small acts of courage we see every day.
By the stories that follow the Hero's Journey.
By Sam Gamgee more than Aragorn. Because Sam is afraid. Because Aragorn is a warrior, whereas Sam is a normal Hobbit. A gardener. Plucked away from life by the call to adventure; required to save the world.
By the woman who comes to a coaching session with a stranger one day to say, I am ready to change this.
By the man who posts his article despite the fear deep of judgment and abandonment.
By each individual who looks into the abyss and steps forward anyway.
Courage is one of the most admirable of human qualities.
And it is always there for you.
You simply have to take the next step.
The one you're afraid of.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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