In a social media post last week, I talked briefly about Ryan Holiday’s book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favours the Brave. At the time, I was on my second read-through of the book after having read it roughly a year earlier. I set it aside to read again as I was trying to bring order to my writing space.
Let Us Not Wait
This time around, the book’s epigraph, a quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, really caught my attention:
“Let us not wait for other people to come to us and call upon us to do great deeds. Let us instead be the first to summon the rest to the path of honor. Show yourself to be the bravest of all the captains, with more of a right to leadership than those who are leaders at the present.”1
We cannot wait to act or, as Ryan writes, “Courage calls each of us differently, at different times, in different forms.”2
It isn’t, however, always easy to hear the call and act courageously. Fear can stop us. Doubt can stop us. What other people may think can stop us.
Fortune Favours the Bold
Deciding and committing to run a marathon. Plunging into the entrepreneurial world and launching your first product. Submitting your first short story or book manuscript for publication. You cannot succeed if you do not put yourself out there. And putting yourself out there is how courage is built.
Courage gives us the strength to face down criticism, the tenacity to try again if we fail, and the resiliency to navigate through whatever is thrown our way. Translation: fortune favours the bold.
The Call to Courage
Here is my advice: do not delay. Do not say, “I’ll do it tomorrow” or “I just need this to happen before…” Strike now. Take a chance and do whatever it is you feel called to do, because the ‘right time’ or the ‘right circumstances’ may never present. The right time is now when you decide to write your story and change your life.
Courage is calling.
Will you answer the call?
[…] cooking, policing (notice that writing didn’t make the list then)—yet I really had no clue what I wanted to do. But like my older sister, I’d follow ‘the plan’ and go to university because our parents […]