Finding Courage & Overcoming Fear - Ryan Holiday | Modern Wisdom Podcast 378

I don't have faith in myself, I have evidence. If you have faith in yourself, you're operating on some false, almost delusional level. False says like, without evidence, I believe. Evidence says like, here's the information that I have to make what I think is a good call, but I could be wrong. Like, when I wrote my first book, I didn't have faith that I could complete it; I had evidence that I've completed hard things before, that I had trained for this, that I wasn't a quitter. And so I was willing to make that leap. But the idea that I knew for certain that I would finish, that it would be a success, that I wouldn't regret walking away from a sure thing to do an unsure thing, I mean, that's, that's the whole point. (wind blows)

So I've been watching a lot of the September 11th documentaries, obviously 20th anniversary, and watching that, like, it, it genuinely doesn't feel real to me. It's shaken my worldview a lot more than I thought it would watching it back. I was 12, something, at the time. I remember my mom picking me up from school and it was on the radio, but that was kind of it. But yeah, watching that back, it seems insane that that even happened, and then watching it from the perspective of the firefighters and the police officers is ridiculous.

Yeah, it is. I was a freshman in high school, so I remember being on a, on a, on the West Coast time zone, I remember waking up and it was on the radio and sort of getting the sense that life wouldn't be the same again. I think looking, you know, at it with 20 years distance, you, I think, uh, especially pertaining to the new book, sort of two, two big themes emerged to me. One was the sort of quiet, ordinary heroism that you're talking about, whether it's firefighters or policemen, or just people who were in the buildings, like, uh, working. You know, some people just ran away and some people said, "I'm not leaving until I get all of my people out with me." Right? People who had no sort of real legal or professional obligation, they were just office colleagues sort of reacting with e- extraordinary courage and compassion and, and, uh, selflessness. And then I think you contrast that, 'cause I've been thinking a lot about this too, obviously it coincides with the withdraw from Afghanistan, the, there's sort of two kinds of courage, right? There's the courage that, uh, charges ahead into a burning building, but there's also, uh, I think, courage in restraint, in sort of seeing a provocation within its context. And so, you know, the, the, the terrible tragedy of 9/11 is not just what happens on that day, but then the immense, uh, and mistaken, uh, foreign policy that comes after, not just, uh, you know, uh, uh, y- I think the, the entrance into Afghanistan makes sense. What we sort of do there over the next 20 years makes a lot less sense. What we do, what the United States does in Iraq makes almost no sense in retrospect. Um, and then, and then you look at these successive presidents and prime ministers who lacked the courage to be able to say, like, "What the hell are we doing here? What are we spending all this money and this manpower and this energy on? What are, w- what does this have to do with the, the tragic events that brought us there in the first place?" So w- in the book, I'm talking about courage. It's not just can you run into a building in the middle of a, a terrorist attack and, and save people, although that's really important, but also can you have the courage to, uh, both stick with your convic- convictions and question your convictions? Can you, um... There, there was an expression about Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War that he lacked the courage to be seen as a coward to withdraw from Vietnam, right? And, uh, so, so courage is an immensely complicated topic, but I think 9/11 brings all of its various forms to the forefront, for sure.