The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines courage as mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.
Curiously enough, one of the most experienced programmers in the world, Kent Beck, includes courage as one of the four pillar values of XP in his book Extreme Programming Explained. In fact, he puts it in fourth position, following Communication, Simplicity and Feedback. This is important in the sense that Beck implies that you can’t have courage isolated from the other three values; in Beck’s words, if you don’t have the first three values in place, courage by itself is just plain hacking (in the pejorative sense of that word).
But of all the quotes I know about courage, I think the most emotionally accurate is this one:
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
I love it! It has an unstoppable rhythm: boom, boom, boooom! No wonder he was such a great writer, this Twain. More than a definition, it is a poem in itself, some kind of a haiku. There are three nouns sharing its tonic syllable: resistance, mastery, absence… It looks like a Buddhist mantra reaching towards nirvana in the absence final punch line… But absence is not stated here as a positive noun as we would expect in a formal definition: it is negated! And why would Mr. Twain decide to negate it instead of providing a positive statement of what the object of his definition is? Because it is necessary to remark that it’s probably one of the most misunderstood words in the emotional vocabulary of any human being.
Most of us, in a more or less unconscious manner, associate being courageous with not having fear. That’s probably why Mr. Twain consciously decided to mention the what-is-not as a punch line in his definition of courage: it’s not only that courage means not the absence of fear. What is more, in fact courage needs fear in order to exist: without fear, there can be no courage. Of course the presence of fear doesn’t necessarily entail courage, but it’s the first ingredient if you want to cook some courage. Withou fear, courage is not so, it’s just recklessness.
Monsters under the bed
We’ve all being little children. We’ve all suffered some kind of fear or another, feeling overwhelmed by it. We’ve all admired the courage of the hero in a movie. Few of us realized that the hero was shitting in his pants (or skirt).
But for some reason, just very few of us have the courage of being courageous in our everyday life when we reach adulthood. Why? Probably just because we apply the wrong formula:
FEAR = COWARDICE
This formula tells us that the more fear we feel, the more cowards we are. And the point is, if we take fear in isolation, that formula is actually true. As Sir Churchill put it:
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
Winston Churchill
A more accurate formula, at least in the context of the natural fear that a normal human being experiences through life would be the one defined by Mr. Twain:
COURAGE = FEAR * (RESISTANCE + MASTERY)
In other words:
FEAR = COURAGE / (RESISTANCE + MASTERY)
In this formula, only fear and courage are innate. Resistance and Mastery are skills that we must acquire and practice by and in ourselves. If we don’t, the first formula (FEAR = COWARDICE) will take over of our lives, making success look just like a consecuence of good luck and failure like the outcome of bad luck.
Moral of the story
The curiosity killed the cat, but the cat has seven lives (even nine in some places). And this means… practice courage, ladies and gentlemen! You’ll never be alone in cowardice, that’s true. But not because you’ll be accompanied by a lot of people, but because you’ll never BE at all being a coward. However, be courageous and, at least, you’ll always have one human being with you: yourself.
