Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is maintaining integrity in the face of fear. Far from being blind and thoughtless bravado, courage generally entails knowing the consequences of your actions. People who act courageously know that the consequences of inaction are worse than the consequences of their courageous acts.

Sacrifice and courage cannot co-exist. Courage is a deeply selfish thing. That, of course, does not make it bad in any way. You cannot really care about someone else before caring about yourself and what you value.

Maintaining integrity requires living up to your own ideals. Not someone else’s. It is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is a lowly act. It requires you to surrender a greater value for a lesser one. Sacrifice is the opposite of courage. It is cowardice.

“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

— E.E. Cummings

Indeed, courage is about being yourself. Courage is not caring what other people think. It is not about the “greater good”. It is about what you think is good.

Some live their lives escaping from pain. Very few seek the achievement of happiness. Some are guided by threats, their only incentive is fear. Very few are driven by love.

Being truly selfish is one of the noblest pursuits there is.

The weekly roundup

1. Book I’m reading

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clayson

“Wealth grows in magic ways. No man can prophesy the limit of it.”

— George S. Clayson, The Richest Man in Babylon

2. Other book I’m reading

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

3. What grades reflect

All grades on my report card reflected cooperation, not intelligence.

— from a tweet

4. Libertarian Leonard E. Read on prosperity and wealth

“There could be no greater error than to conclude that statism caused prosperity.”

“Wealth, in a moral and creative sense, is not for the purpose of escaping from life—retiring, vegetating—but rather for getting ever deeper into life along the lines of one’s distinctive aptitudes. Wealth is neither an end in itself nor a means to avoid work but a means to greater creative endeavor.”

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