No One is Born With Courage, You Get It By Doing Difficult Things

No one is born with courage

In Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath there are a few stories he uses to illustrate this point. When people go through difficult moments in life, it doesn’t make them weaker, quite the opposite, it makes them stronger. No better of an example than that of London in World War II.

It’s World War II and you’re living in London

The government is preparing for mass casualties, 250,000 dead they thought they would have to deal with as well as the vast mental health patients seeking medical help. Hospitals were built on the outskirts of town to deal with all the mental and physical damage they were anticipating from the German bombings. But once the war started something interesting happened. Those facilities were never used as “mental hospitals” at all, there wasn’t the mass hysteria from being bombed constantly. On the contrary, people became more resilient in the face of danger.

Why would you think you had more courage when your city was being bombed?

Canadian psychiatrist, J. T. MacCurdy groups the people in a bombing in three categories, the casualties, the near misses, and the remote misses. The Casualties are the first group, but they don’t do much of causing panic, as the psychiatrist puts it:

“the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter. Put this way the fact is obvious, corpses do not run about spreading panic.”

The second group the Near Miss group may have experienced some trauma. A bomb went off so close to them they have injuries but in time they will be fine.

The last group the Remote Miss group are the ones who hear the destruction but are left unscathed. This is a psychological benefit, people see themselves as rather invincible, they’ve survived a bombing afterall! One quote from Gladwell’s story when one fellow was asked if we wanted to leave London during the bombings? His response? “Not for all the tea in China!”, he was having a blast, literally. People were benefiting from the tragedy happening around them.

It’s hard when you’re going through a difficult time to see the positives you are gaining just from enduring it. Sometimes it’s better to struggle through things because it makes us appreciate them much more. Conversely, if you’ve been born with a so-called “silver spoon in your mouth“, you probably haven’t had to struggle much. Without the struggle you don’t learn how to fight, compromise, or try harder in the face of adversity. The silver spoon kids will assume the world is centred around them, without the skillset to work hard for what they want they assume the world is out to get them.

Better to struggle early on. Does that mean there is such a concept as desirable difficulties? 

Yes.