PNTV: The Courage to Create by Rollo May (#99)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got the book the Courage to Create by Rollo May. I can't find it, so just imagine it here. The Courage to Create by Rolo may. He's a 20th century existential psychologist. Awesome guy. This book is all about the fact that it takes courage to create our extraordinary lives, to create an optimal life, to truly give ourselves to the world and actualize our potentialities. Really cool stuff. The book is packed with big ideas on how we can integrate our fear and our despair into our lives and alchemize that energy with courage to truly create an extraordinarily awesome life. So the first thing I want to talk about is the origin of the word courage. I just love this. The word courage, Rola May teaches us, comes from the French word for heart. So just as a heart pumps blood to all the organs and our arms and legs and gives our body life and vitality, so courage is the virtue that pumps vitality to all the other virtues. All of our other values in our life come to life because of our courage. Without courage, he says, all the other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.

Really cool idea.

So courage is essential. It's like our beating heart to living our most wonderful lives. And he also says very importantly that courage is, is not the opposite of despair. It's not about not having despair, not having any fear. It's about feeling fear. We're feeling despair and all the doubts that come up when we live our lives, especially when we live our lives at the edge. When we feel those emotions, courage is all about alchemizing them and having the ability and the willpower and the foresight and the discipline and the self control to. To move through those fears. That's the virtue that courage is. But it's not the opposite of despair. It's not being fearless. We talk often about Aristotle and his mean. I'm going to repeat it here because this is just such a great idea. So Aristotle 2500 years ago was talking about the virtuous mean, which is kind of the middle path of Buddhism, right? The virtuous mean. For Aristotle, the virtue was the mean between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. So courage is the virtuous mean, the vice of deficiency. If you didn't have enough courage, what would you be? You'd be a coward. Cowardice would be the vice of deficiency. Too little courage. Now if you had too much courage, what would that be? He says it's rashness. That that's the vice of excess. You've got too much, too little, too much. Neither one is good. You don't want to be a coward, you don't want to be rash. A coward obviously isn't willing to go into the challenges of life. Someone who's rash is going to jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Just do silly, stupid things. So we want to find the virtuous mean. But the important thing here is it's not about no fear. No, fear is a vice. We want to have a proper amount of fear and the action to move through in spite of the fear. Great.

Really, really cool idea.

And in the note, I talk about some great people who. Well, John Elliot, another one of the notes. We have wrote a book called Overachievement. Awesome book. All about going out and just crushing it. Overachievement. And he talks about the fact that the greatest among us, we have this myth that the greatest among us just don't have fear. They might have had fear before, but they don't anymore. And even if they did before then not a lot. Not like us, right? He says that's nonsense. The greatest performance still have fear. And they know that those nerves that come up are what give them an edge. It's amazing to look at it from that vantage point. He tells the story of Bill Russell, one of the greatest athletes ever won an Olympic gold medal, an NCAA basketball championship and an NBA championship in the same year. The only athlete to ever do that. And he had one little problem. He threw up before every game he played. He was so nervous. Now this was an extraordinary world class athlete who threw up before every game. Except one season he didn't. And he wound up having the worst season of his career until playoffs came and he kicked in again. He threw up. And all of his teammates knew he was going to play well. And he went out and rocked it. Georgia o' Keeffe says, I've been afraid every day of my life, but I never let that stop me from doing what I needed to do. So it's not about not having fear. It's about having the courage to create. The courage to move through and create our most extraordinary life. Really cool stuff. Practically speaking. My number one practice personally to deal with fear goes something like this. When I feel fear come up, the first step is to feel it. So you feel your heart racing, you get your palms a little sweaty, you observe it and you see, wow, okay, I'm feeling some fear. That first step is huge. Then you realize before I used to think that Was bad. Something was wrong with me, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs. So I just wouldn't do things. I had a phone call today preparing for something, and I got a little nervous. Before. I was excited, right? Before, I would have interpreted that as something was wrong with me. Now, overachievement. He says, no, no, no, no. That's great. Just interpret it a different way. So I interpreted it as. So the first step was observing it. Then I actually take a deep breath, right? And kind of breathe into that. Because we tend to get shallow in our breathing when we feel fear. So take a deep breath. And then I looked at it and said, cool. I'm just excited about this. I want to have a great call. I want to do well. Right? I see that, and I realize, okay, cool. It's just what our body does to try to prepare us to do well, right? Dennis Waitley. We just did an episode on him. He says, butterflies are cool. That's butterflies. Moths are bad when they start eating away at you. But just enjoy the butterflies. So the butterflies are coming up, nerves are coming up. Look at it, observe it, wave at it, and then breathe into it. And then the big thing is, at the end of that is to realize it's all about expectations. If I think I'm going to totally screw up, and I'm saying to myself, are you going to be an idiot? You're going to totally screw it up. Like that time and that time and that time, and my expectation is going to be negative. I'm going to have a lot of fear. If, on the other hand, what I do is, I say, this is going to be awesome. I'm excited about the call. We're going to have so much fun. We're going to have a great connection. We're going to get really excited about what's coming up. Excitement. My expectation is positive. I have excitement. If my expectation was negative, I'd have fear. Positive excitement. So anyway, I observe it, I breathe, and I make a positive expectation. And then the energy is alchemized. Really cool process. Highly recommend it. We will move on. Courage to create. So he says again that it's not about not having despair. It's about having commitment in the face of it. We've talked about that here. He says, the thing about being human is that it takes a conscious choice to live your most authentically expressed life. He says, an acorn becomes an oak without any thought. Same with a kitten becomes a cat. It's just natural. Their being is their nature. They're identical with Us, it takes a conscious commitment, which takes courage, which is why this is so important. He says finding the courage to move in the face of fear, he calls it finding our center of strength is the greatest way we can serve the world. If we want to serve the world, the greatest way we can do that is to find our own center.

Really, really cool idea.

And he says this. Every organism has one and only one central need in life to fulfill its own potentialities. I'll read that again. Every organism has one and only one central need in life to fulfill its own potentiality. That's pretty strong. We have this impulse, this urge to fulfill our latent potentialities. We don't do that. We're going to suffer. We talk about Abraham Maslow all the time. He says what one can be, one must be. There's no getting around that one. And it will take different forms for different people. For me, it's studying and embodying and sharing these truths. For you, it might be being an excellent parent or a teacher or an artist or an entrepreneur or a musician. It takes different forms for different people, but the impulse remains.

Really powerful idea.

He says, if you don't express your own original self, you don't have the courage to create. Not only are you betraying yourself, you're betraying your community. You're not giving us. You're not giving the world what we need from you.

Really cool idea.

And he says finally that joy, rather than happiness is the ultimate goal of life. Because joy is what we feel when we most fully give ourselves, when we have the courage to create and authentically express ourselves.

Really cool idea.

So I wish you radiant joy, adequate courage to go out and rock it. Hope you dug it. Remember, courage is like our hearts, the heart of virtue, pumping blood to all of our other virtues. And we've got the breath and then the expectation that's positive. When we feel fear crawling up, go out and rock it. There you go. Courage to create. Robomay. Hope you dug it. Share more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See you.