Gus Lee

What do humans really need? Surveys say we simply need to be loved, happy, prosperous, safe, and free. Then culture pitches its popular shiny objects of friends, smarts, health, wealth, power. Result? Two-thirds of us are unhappy, and we get dropped from the Global List of Happy Countries. Eighty percent of Americans dislikes our divisive politics and inflation is at 18%. Half our workers are miserable; the odds of global thermonuclear war jumped in 2023; and half of our 18-25-year-olds fall into clinical anxiety.

Okay, that’s the humorous part.

Experts have long held that humans only need the one thing. Happily, that One Thing also produces the outcomes we want. Philosopher Aristotle empirically discovered it as the quality that guarantees the goodness of all other human qualities. Influencer J.M. Barrie taught it as the essential virtue in life. Prime Minister Winston Churchill used it to inspire a hopeless, defeated nation as it faced total defeat. Poet Laureate Maya Angelou said that it makes everything we need come alive. Author Brené Brown found that it correlates with human happiness. A small band of leadership experts recognize it as the single most important human ability in leaders, and in finding meaning, attaining contentment, and producing sustainable organizational success. Yet this One Thing never hits our lists of crucial needs. What is it?

It’s long been Moral Courage. Hugely needed, grossly misunderstood, scratched from all curricula, and functionally forgotten, this discarded truth doesn’t need us, but we badly need it. Courage causes some, amid our daily doses of fear, anxiety, stress, discontent, and uncertainty, to say, “Gus, you’re kidding!”

So, why courage? (Why not?) The explanation is proven (there’s data). It’s profound (a nexus of material and spiritual existentialism), and it’s ponderous (but I wrote only once for Encyclopedia Britannica). One reason is that without moral courage, we get gut-punched by the always painful, pitiful, and preventable life-wreckers of fear, anger, anxiety, cowardice, avoidance, excuses, blame, cynicism, despair, disrespect, dread, intolerance, lawlessness, pessimism, scorn, genocides, and hatred, to only name a few.

What does courage have to do with getting what we want most in life?

Everything. Please consider that

if we want to BE LOVED, we need courage because I’m way far from lovable when I’m fearfully ungoverned, anxious, avoidant, blaming, angry. Without courage, my ability to love is as good as dead meat to the powers of stress, fatigue, frictions, job, money, parenting, respect, and arguing over where to eat. To be courageous is to love and not become a victim of loneliness, sadness, or hopelessness. This is the most eloquent voice for choosing moral courage over fear. (Fear makes us selfish and … unloved.)

TO BE HAPPY, we need lots of courage to resist life’s incessant and intrusive messiness. Uninterrupted fear breaks our dreams, hopes, and relationships. We retreat into our screens and forfeit the willingness and ability to interact with each other. Happiness (vs. momentary wow! events) depends on a courageous worldview that finds contentment without celebrating our fears. (Fear makes us become … lonely.)

TO BE PROSPEROUS, to be inwardly rich, we need the guts to deeply care about others. This is true, permanent wealth. We’re not rich when we’re fearful and unloved. (Fear makes us… poor.)

TO FEEL SAFE, we need big servings of courage to overcome anxiety, distress, and worry. This isn’t Mission Implausible — it’s how professionals do it. (Without our courage, we feel … unsafe.)

TO BE FREE, we courageously liberate ourselves from fear’s addictions of worry, fretting, anxiety, resentment, and anger. When we reversed our gifts, we quietly offered our wrists to the handcuffs of bad news, worse news, and catastrophic news on the hour. We became our own self-inflicted prisoners of fear. (In this little closet locked away with fear-peddling media, we’re not … free.)

If Moral Courage is so vital, why is it so rare? So many reasons. I think the first is captured in the universal mnemonic, WGFAGPOU. We’ll break down what that means for you in the next post.

Meanwhile, if you’re a high achiever, or an insomniac, or worry too much, or you lead others, or develop leaders, feel (courageously) free to read or listen ahead in The Courage Playbook:

Also available on Amazon Audible.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Playbook-Steps-Overcome-Become/dp/1119848903/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1DYZRIGNEMVFK&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rk-hAoeieQwAiMeITUvSbyOxTnpG2R-wQpD1SR5scepck0_ZVUlZOFayX9wjvD-Vz4tQGNpS4Gr4fD2ydd7gONUaDfvMsj4neYlHUNNuiHVXoWgfIzJeZ6qm2b-KnzHq.Nlj54oqPXfWu0SwokX5IhvWqphuMLmuuvZ-DZuhEDpg&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+courage+playbook+hardcover&qid=1731548349&s=audible&sprefix=the+courage+playbook+hardcover%2Caudible%2C186&sr=1-1-catcorr

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-courage-playbook-gus-lee/1140119834?ean=9781119848905

Now out there, resolve today to act courageously once. See you next time

I am deeply honored by the decision of West Point’s Library and Associate Dean Christopher D. Barth, Director of Libraries and Archives, to receive the original manuscripts of my eight books.

      Years ago, as an immature poker-playing Cadet, I often used the USMA Library not to complete required reading, but to devour novels and to study arcane archives. Meanwhile, CPT Chester Joseph Stanley Piolunek, my wounded, war-hero English prof, via To Kill a Mockingbird, was stealthily teaching me how to write.

       My modest writing collection is currently half novels and half-non-fiction. West Point later selected one from each category to become examinable required reading by West Point Cadets, to lamentably include the course that produced the lowest average grades.

West Point later forgave me my low grades and named me its first chair of character development. Now, the Academy Library has added my writing to its illustrious permanent historical collections.

       I absolutely know that only in America could a sickly, blind, self-doubting kid from a poor, broken immigrant family learn to become a novelist at a renowned service academy. Only in the USA could military service have given me skills of the spirit to strive, however imperfectly, to provide value, however small, to all others regardless of the person’s background and regardless of feelings.,

Duty Honor Country, and a Present Arms to all our veterans.

I’ll next return to How to Get Courage.

BELICHICK, DR. KING & UPSIDE DOWN VALUES. How do the hated Patriots rule the NFL? Jerry Rice overcame poor speed with harder work. Fred Astaire was not a great dancer but a great rehearser.[i] Tom Brady, maybe The Greatest of All Time, has won more Super Bowls and MVPs than Wheaties has flakes, yet he opts to rank only 15^th in QB pay.

“Kid,” said YMCA Coach Tony, “yur upside-down. Ya missed class the day they gave out bodies ‘n other fighters got all the muscles. They ain’t blind like a bat with the asthma ‘n don’t cry ‘n wheeze in the ring.” I strove to be a black male youth, an honorable goal for which I was poorly suited. Coach was training me to box other street kids who were stronger, faster and tougher.

“Build yur try, yur endurance. First round, the opponent’ll beat you like a bongo drum. But in the last round, he’s tired, arm-weary, slow, ‘n his kidneys hurt. If yur conditioned better and got the spirit to be tough when yur tired, sure as bears crap in the woods, you’ll beat a stronger fighter.”

The YMCA’s upside down values: Mind, Body, Spirit. Spirit meant courage, and we got courage by practicing it, again and again. From courage came a better Body to be used for right purposes, and a Mind that would help others. Without moral courage, I’d be an ego with biceps and would use Mind to be a show-off. For little pay, my coaches trained angry and violent teens in the disciplines of moral courage. They taught us not to look good, but to be good to others.

The Pats are also upside-down. Others saw Brady, Edelman, White and Van Noy as weak, small and as promising as my first attempts to box. Coach Belichick studies the opponent’s moral flaws and then game-plans to win; his opponents try to beat him with physical strength.

Belichick values courage, humility and responsibility. They love team more than self and the game more than raises. They embrace a gut-busting Ranger School-like regimen to be the NFL’s smartest, most reliable and best-conditioned team. The Pats chose to run onto the field as a team with no names. They don’t showboat; they toss each other’s hair. They improve from early games and learn from first halves and win in the 4th quarter by being smarter, stronger, more focused and more inter-dependent. Not all NFL players, or people in other fields, want to be humble or work that hard.

It’s not being bigger, special or having groovy music, cool threads, fun friends or living based on how we feel. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our true identity is not in color of skin, beauty of thoughts, depth of passion, specialness of Me, or firmness of bodies.

He said his children should be judged by the content of their character. That was for us. We are our selflessness and our brave oaths to honor all persons. We are the quotient of our courage.  

Can you live his upside-down words? 1. Are you selfless or selfish? 2. Respect all persons or dis those who disagree with you? 3. Self-disciplined or quick to anger? 4. Always improving how you treat others or increasing how you blame others? May we all improve our answers!

Next time: the difference between honesty, grit, ethics, courage and character.

From The Courage Quotient, the working title of Gus’s next book.

Photo: http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/15160801/new-england-patriots-bill-belichick-calls-tom-brady-greatest-quarterback-all

[i] Attributed to Fred Astaire