On Courage

Editor’s Note: This essay explores courage not as performance or bravado, but as attention — to meaning, to discomfort, to the quiet signals that shape a life and a body of work.

It sits within the Cultivated canon on creative climate and aliveness at work, and underpins the Idea → Value philosophy: systems move ideas, but courage gives them direction.

On Courage

The word courage comes from the Latin cor:
the heart.

To listen to what your heart is telling you
— and to follow it.
That is courage.

Not the cinematic version.
Not the chest-thumping certainty we are taught to admire.
Not the rush to take control.

The original meaning is quieter, almost subversive.
In a culture organised around efficiency, prediction, and control, listening to the heart can feel radical.

Modern organisations are built to reduce uncertainty.
They prize systems, processes, metrics, and forecasts.

And rightly so — there is a domain of work that benefits from structure and discipline. With enough time and effort, parts of complexity can be shaped into reliable flows that move ideas toward value.

But workplaces are not only technical systems.
They are human environments.

People are not problems to be solved.
They are sources of meaning, imagination, creativity and aliveness.
When that humanity is honoured, work becomes vibrant.
When it is ignored, something subtle begins to fade.

Not abruptly.
Politely.
Almost invisibly.

We learn the language.
We learn the rituals.
We learn how to be competent and sensible and explainable.
We learn to say this makes sense even when it feels hollow.

And so we continue.
Efficient.
Productive.
Quietly disconnected.

People do not lose motivation because they lack discipline.
They lose it because they stop recognising themselves in what they do.
They lose it because the climate of work narrows what is possible to feel, to imagine, to hope.
They lose it because there is no compelling picture of a future worth moving toward.

This is not a productivity problem.
It is a meaning problem.

It is what happens when the heart is no longer consulted.

Courage, in its original sense, is not about charging forward.
It is about listening.

Listening to discomfort.
Listening to the small tug that says this isn’t quite right.
Listening to the quieter voice that says this isn’t what I’m here to do.

That kind of listening is inconvenient.
It resists spreadsheets and forecasts.
It cannot be fully anticipated or governed.
Which is why it is so often edited out of organisational life.

And yet, courage persists.

It appears in small, ordinary acts:

• choosing clarity when vagueness would be safer
• declining work that drains you, even when it looks impressive
• staying with an idea long enough for it to reveal its shape
• sharing something unfinished because it is honest
• creating without immediate justification
• being kind, deliberately, to shape the climate around you
• building a body of work instead of chasing attention
• noticing when your life has drifted off course — and adjusting, gently

Courage is rarely dramatic.
It is cumulative.
Equine in nature: patient, grounded, directional.

Most courage unfolds quietly, through small insights and subsequent decisions that slowly realign a life.

This year, my intention is not optimisation or scale.
It is courage.

For me, that means:

• trusting the pull toward publishing rather than pitching
• making work that feels alive before it feels marketable
• letting a body of work emerge instead of forcing outcomes
• resisting the performance of certainty when curiosity is more honest
• allowing creative instinct to lead, rather than be suppressed

Courage does not eliminate fear.
It simply refuses to let fear have the final word.

It is practiced daily—
in conversations,
in choices,
in attention,
in what we quietly walk away from.

The heart rarely shouts.
But it does repeat itself.

And courage, it turns out, is nothing more
— and nothing less
— than the willingness to listen to the heart,
and act accordingly.