Ranjay Gulati

And how do we learn to then take the best course of action we possibly can versus fear clouds judgment, fear clouds the amygdala, fear clouds the prefrontal cortex, and we are just paralyzed.

So what I've discovered is these people who are courageous, as we characterize them, they somehow instinctively

have created a system in their own minds about learning to tame fear, even sometimes trick fear.

They have a relationship with fear that somehow allows them not to be paralyzed by it.

Now, I tried to find the social science research around it saying like, what are these people doing here?

And I was looking not at like famous characters only, right?

I was looking at Brandon Say, a cashier at a dance hall in California when a mass shooter came in.

Captain Sullenberger who landed the plane in the Hudson River.

But not just people like that who are in the moment courageous.

I also looked at Frances Haugen, who was my former student, who spent one year agonizing over whether she should be the whistleblower at Facebook.

And so there is sometimes there are instinctive, immoral courage.

Some are more intentional, deliberate courage.

Some involve physical courage, meaning it's physical danger.

Some are moral courage.

The word courage gets associated a lot and is confused.

So I was trying to say my biggest learning was that courage is accessible to all.

It's a skill.

It's a muscle we can all acquire.

Given the uncertainty in the world around us and the manifest fear that comes with it, I think it's important to think about courage as a currency we all need today.

We need to resource ourselves to not let fear paralyze us in the world we are trying to navigate and live through right now.