COURAGE


Courage! It sounds an easy quality to possess, bringing with it the
dreams of V.C.s, and bestowing on every man worth the name the power to
endure physical danger. But courage in business is a more complex
affair. It presupposes a logical dilemma which can only be escaped in
the field of practice.

The man who has nothing but courage easily lets this quality turn into
mere stubbornness, and a crass obstinacy is as much a hindrance to
business success as a moral weakness. Yet to the man who does not
possess moral courage the most brilliant abilities may prove utterly
useless. There is the folly of resistance and the folly of complaisance.
There is the tendency towards eternal compromise and the desire for
futile battle. Until the mind of youth has adjusted itself between the
two extremes and formed a technique which is not so much independent of
either tendency as inclusive of both, youth cannot hope for great
success.

The evils which pure stubbornness brings in its train are perfectly
clear. Men cling to a business indefinitely in the fond wish that a loss
may yet be turned into a profit. They hope on for a better day which
their intelligence tells them will never dawn. For this attitude of mind
stupidity is a better word than stubbornness, and a far better word than
courage. When reason and judgment bid us give up the immediate battle
and start afresh on some new line, it is intellectual cowardice, not
moral courage, which bids us persevere. This obstinacy is the reverse of
the shield of which courage is the shining emblem--for courage in its
very essence can never be divorced from judgment.