At some point they are going to get it.
Perhaps they’ll hold elected office. Perhaps they’ll witness something unethical at work. They’ll enter the terrifying, tempting world. Maybe they’ll be a scientist pursuing a controversial or unorthodox idea. Maybe they’ll have a dream for a new business. Maybe they’ll be an athlete considering a political stand that will jeopardize their career or their endorsements.
The exact circumstances don’t matter. What matters is that one day they are going to get the call for courage.
“To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
It’s more accurate to say that life has many of these moments, many such taps on the shoulder: to serve, to take a risk, to run toward danger while others run away, to do a thing that people tell them is impossible.
They will have many reasons to think it’s the wrong thing to do. They will be pressured to put their dreams out of their mind. Fear will make itself felt. Will they let it prevent them from answering the call? Will they leave the phone ringing? Will their moment find them unprepared? Will their finest hour pass them by like a ship in the night?
What a tragedy that would be. Our job as parents is to make sure that doesn’t happen to our kids. Our job is to help inch them closer and closer to doing what they were put here to do, to being who they were meant to become. We are supposed to prepare them for when the phone rings, for when they get tapped on the shoulder. Because the one thing we know for certain is the call is going to come.
Will they be prepared to answer?
We are really excited to announce that Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, is available for preorder. It’s been our great honor to write this daily email to you all, every day for the last two years. If you have gotten anything out of it—if you enjoy Ryan’s writing at all—we’d love for you to consider picking up his new book.
The blurbs and early reviews hint that this may be his best book yet. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch wrote that it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.” To make it worth your while, we’ve put together a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses—among them is something Ryan’s never given away: a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder
