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If—

By Rudyard Kipling, 1895

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

CHAPTER TWO

COURAGE

* * *

Philosophers have attempted to define courage for millennia. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, establishes perhaps the best working definition of this virtue. Courage, according to Aristotle, is the mean between fear and recklessness. Cowards shrink even from things that shouldn’t be feared, while reckless men, buoyed by unwarranted confidence, take unnecessary risks. The courageous man, however, strikes a balance between irrational fear and foolhardy recklessness. He fears that which should be feared but remains steadfast for the right reason. That right reason, according to Aristotle, is for the sake of honor and nobility. In short, courage consists of acknowledging rational fears but acting nobly despite these fears in order to maintain manly honor.

A man can display courage in different ways. Physical courage is the type of courage that often first comes to mind when we think about this virtue. Tales of brave soldiers charging up a hill amid whizzing bullets consume our boyish imaginations. We are inspired and humbled by the stories of firemen and police officers rushing into the burning towers on 9/11 while everyone else was running out. We all hope that when called upon in a crisis, we too would be willing to risk our physical safety to save the lives of others.

A man can also display intellectual courage. History is filled with great figures—men like Socrates, Descartes, Bacon, and Darwin—who faced persecution for their ideas, yet endured social sanction with manly courage. Because of their courage to think differently and stand up for their ideas, society advanced and improved.

Finally, a man can show moral courage. Moral courage can be defined as the determination to follow what one believes to be right, regardless of the cost to one’s self, and irrespective of the disapproval of others. Moral courage has been displayed by great leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and ordinary people like the Chinese protester who stood in the way of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, young American civil rights activists who faced down angry mobs, brutal fire hoses and ferocious dogs, and the saints and believers of many religions who chose punishment and death rather than the renunciation of their faith.

In this chapter, we’ve pulled together writings that discuss the many different expressions of courage. They demonstrate the way in which all three types