This is a YouTube video titled "Be Your Own Hero: Take Risks, Face Your Fears and Choose Courage with Ryan Holiday" featuring a monologue-style discussion by Ryan Holiday recorded in July 2022. The content explores themes of fear, courage, and heroism, using historical examples like Florence Nightingale and reflections on contemporary anxieties such as the COVID pandemic. The format is a single-speaker talk without conversational interaction.
Chapters
Bulletproof radio.
A state of high performance. Let's get into the stuff you're teaching in Courage Is Calling. There's basically fear. There's courage and there's heroism. And you look at those separately. Can you tell me what's the difference between those?
Yeah, I think so. Before you, before there is courage, there is fear, right? Because if there. There's not fear, there's no courage, right? The. The whole point is if it was guaranteed, if it was safe, if you weren't afraid of it, there would be no opportunity for courage, right? So one is. One requires the other. So the first part of the book is really about this battle that we all face in different ways, in different forms, at different levels. But fear is a constant of the human experience, right? We're afraid of what other people think. We're afraid of losing our lives. We're afraid of so many different things in whatever it is that we happen to be doing. So that's the sort of the first battle. And I tell the story of Florence Nightingale. You know, she gets this call. She has this sense that I think a lot of people have that, like, I'm meant to do something special, like I'm not going to have my parents life. She comes from these rich, sort of indolent, spoiled parents in, you know, the British countryside in the middle of the 1800s. Like, she was expected to do nothing. She was expected to go to dance parties, get married, keep a house, that's it. And she has this sense that she's meant for more, but she can't. She can't muster up the courage to pursue that. She's afraid. She's afraid of what people might think. She's afraid of what her parents might think. She's afraid of, you know, it not working. She. So she ignores this call. I think this is a thing we miss, right? If you look at the Hero's Journey, the. The. An early step in the hero's journey is the refusal of the call, right? We're like, I'm not ready. It's not for me, it's not going to work. So she refuses the call. Not like for a little while, but for 16 years she just sits on this until eventually she does get this sense that she's never going to be happy, she's never going to lead a good life. She's never actually going to please these people that have imprisoned her by doing what they want. And she has to strike out on her own. And she ends up inventing, essentially modern nursing in rebellion to this. But that fear is the first battle. And it's not until we get over that do we express that first bit of courage that we can begin to live a sort of courageous, exciting, adventurous life.
Based on what you've learned about that part of courage, there's a lot of people who are kind of losing their minds right now. Maybe a little bit more on the fear side of things. What's your advice to reclaim courage if you're just feeling. You watch the news all the time and you're feeling like it's the end of the world.
Yeah. I mean, look, these are scary, weird times. I mean, it's a. It's. It's sort of like, you know, you hear about the history that your grandparents lived through and it seems very interesting and fun, but it probably wasn't super fun at the time. Right.
Like World War II kind of sucked. Right?
Yeah. I mean, look, like my grandfather lived through the Depression. Right. He wasn't aware how that would end in the middle of the Depression. Right. You know, he's 15 years old in the depths of the Depression. He's not aware one that it's going to. First off, he's going to have to go, you know, land at D day before this thing is over. But he's also just not aware that like, oh, this is a temporary thing. This is a thing that will actually put in, forth. Put forth a century of American dominance. Right. We don't know how the story is going to end. So when we study history, these events seem much more clean, clean and clear cut than they were at the time. Right. They could have gone in any direction. And so I think we should be empathetic to the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty and people are dealing with that. But I would also argue that people were afraid long before COVID They were anxious, they were worried, they overstated risks of things they were afraid of. Really not scary things. Right. Like people are afraid of public speaking.
I mean, it's the number one fear.
In the U.S. yeah, like public speaking is scary, but even if the odds of COVID are somewhat overstated, you're definitely not going to die of public speaking. Right. Like you're a half a million people don't die every year of speaking in front of crowds. That is the good news. So we've always had this sort of tendency to be really scared of things that pose very little danger to us that if we could master, would allow us to get closer to whatever it is that we wanted to do in life.
