If it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth in it.
Courage has clear rewards. One takes a risk because they hope for a payoff – something others are afraid to reach for. But what about sacrificing oneself? Or sacrificing deeply for something? There’s courage and then there is heroism, the highest form of courage. The kind embodied in those who are willing to give, perhaps give everything, for someone else.
There is no deed in this life so impossible that you cannot do it. Your whole life should be lived as a heroic deed.
Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.
People who did what needed to be done. People who said, “If not me, then who?
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. William Ernest Henley.
You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t.
Today, each of us receives our own call. To service. To take a risk. To challenge the status quo. To run toward while others run away. To rise above our station. To do what people say is impossible.
History is written with blood, sweat, and tears, and it is etched into eternity by the quiet endurance of courageous people.
Be scared. You can’t help that,” William Faulkner put it. “But don’t be afraid.
I ceaselessly chant the refrain,” Montaigne said, “anything you can do another day can be done now.
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.
There is no better than adversity,” Malcolm X would say. “Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be.
He said they could choose between two attitudes, one that said, “What is going to happen to me?” And the other that said, “What action am I going to take?
Sun Tzu would say that it is best to win without fighting – to have maneuvered in such a way that the enemy has lost before it has even begun.
Happy is the man who can make others better,” Seneca writes, “not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts.
As Marcus Aurelius writes, “True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
We must practice temperance now, in times of plenty, because none of us know what the future holds- only that plenty never lasts.
Character,” de Gaulle reflected at the end of his life, “is above all the ability to disregard insults or abandonment by one’s own people. One must be willing to lose everything. There is no such thing as half a risk.