Read the full transcript of Andrew Winston’s talk titled “How to find courage in difficult times” at TEDxAthens 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Defining Courage
What is courage? Sometimes it’s very clear. A man standing in front of a tank. One of the most iconic moments of the 20th century. This is physical courage. We all recognize it. It’s throwing your body in harm’s way like a war hero or a firefighter. But there’s a range of courage from physical to moral. Doing or saying the hard or the right thing for others. We recognize the leaders of moral courage usually by one name. Mandela, Navalny, Malala.
Now we can’t all be generational leaders, but we don’t need to be. We can use courage to make our own lives rich, to help build a thriving and regenerative and positive world.
The Importance of Courage Today
Now why am I talking about courage? Why is it so important right now? Well, we’re living in a time of incredible crises and challenges, both personal and global. There’s an epidemic of loneliness and depression. One in four adults say that they are very or fairly lonely. And we need courage to move through these personal challenges. Like many of you, I’ve struggled with depression and sometimes getting out of bed feels courageous.
But we’re also facing these incredible global issues, societal issues that are making the personal stuff even harder. We have the existential crisis of climate change. This is really, to me, the final exam for humanity. We either come together to deal with this or we don’t. The cost in life and money is rising very fast as we create parts of the world that are uninhabitable. Unfortunately, we’re also tearing apart the web of life, the biodiversity that we are part of, that we depend on.
And on the social side, there’s inequality, racial, gender, income. The richest 1% of the world have nearly 40% of the money. And half of humanity shares just 2%. And that’s gotten worse over the last 40 years. This creates a crisis of democracy. People feel left behind, so they vote for someone who says, “I will fix it for you,” no matter how many years of empty promises there’s been.
On top of these challenges, we’re in a time of exponential change. And we are built for kind of linear change. We don’t think exponentially. Artificial intelligence is growing faster than I think we can understand, and it’s unnerving.
The Good News
Now there’s some good news, or this would be very depressing. There’s some really good news in exponential growth. We are making progress. We are building a lot of renewable energy, a lot of electric vehicles. We are tackling climate change. But the horizon that we’re shooting for, a safe, just, healthy world for all, is still moving away from us.
We need really deep change in how we do things, how we live, how we get around, how we eat, how businesses and governments operate, and what their goals are. We need courage in our leaders and in ourselves.
Defining Courage
Now courage is actually pretty hard to define, and people have tried forever. Aristotle said that courage was a rationally determined mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. He said it here in Athens. It’s in the eye of the beholder, but research shows that there’s really three key elements. First is risk, kind of obviously. Second is fear. It’s not being fearless, and there’s really interesting developmental studies that show little kids think that being brave is being fearless. But as we grow up, we realize that it’s actually having fear and moving forward anyway. And finally, purpose, a why, a reason for doing the hard thing.
And the pursuit of a thriving life or a thriving world is a pretty powerful why. So moral courage is, in short, not easy. It’s a little scary, but you do it anyways because it matters. It’s the courage to say and do the hard thing and change your behavior, because that’s the only thing we control.
Now I see two kinds of courage that are different, and one is more common. One is reactive, and one is proactive. Now the reactive are just dealing with the things that come at us in life. And if you are lucky enough to live a long life, you will face deep challenges, you will face loss. Some deal with deep trauma, war, abuse, illness, losing everything. But even in the kind of so-called typical life, there are these key pivot points. And it’s scary to move forward and accept new realities, even if they’re expected, like embarking on the great journey of parenthood.
Now this is a key moment in my life. This is the moment my wife and I left the hospital with our firstborn son, one day old. And we were amazed because they let you leave the hospital with a human, without a manual or any guidance. You just get a blanket. And it’s unbelievable that they let you do this. It really, we were shocked, and we were very nervous. This also proves a different point, which is how hard parenting is on you. This was four years ago. Okay, unfortunately, it was 21 years ago. I just pray you weren’t thinking it was 50 years ago.
But you know, life moves on. The kids grow up, we get, we lose jobs, we retire, we lose a parent, we face our own mortality. And I think a life well-lived needs this everyday courage to thrive by enduring the bad and embracing the good. We can use everyday courage to live more fully, help others, and work on the bigger problems. I think it’s an untapped superpower.
Proactive Moral Courage
We can make different choices, do or say the hard thing, and that is proactive moral courage. It’s the courage to be open, not cynical, which is really easy these days. To feel wonder and love, even in the face of hate.
To say, “I don’t know.” It’s really hard for our leaders. And to be vulnerable.
Ted Lasso was the most popular show in the world in the first couple years of the pandemic, and I kind of wondered why. I mean, it’s touching, it’s very funny and smart. But I noticed something about this show. In almost every episode, someone stands up, looks someone in the eye, and says, “I’m sorry.” And the other person generally said, “I forgive you.” This is the courage to say the hard truth, even if it hurts.
I think there’s also a proactive courage in going to be who you are. But also to let people be who they want to be. And more than that, help, advocate for others who are not you. The marginalized, the oppressed. To push back and speak up against bigotry and hate.
Questioning the Status Quo
Now, all of this is hard. But our biggest challenge, I think, may be the courage to question what everyone knows to be true, but may not be. There’s kind of a story that we’ve all been told that we’re living, that tells us what success means. For business, it’s short-term profits for shareholders. For governments, it’s growth, it’s GDP, it’s the stock market. For a person, it’s just stuff, more, money. This story drives many of our problems. But it is just a story, it’s not a fact.
And I think the worst part is that we’re told that unacceptable things are just the way things are. We have to have climate change and pollution if we want a strong economy. Inequality is part of the deal. And violence is to be expected.
The Parkland Example
Now, I’ve seen this assumption play out in a really tragic way in my own country. In the United States, we have gun violence in schools. In 2018, a gunman walked into the high school in the town of Parkland, Florida, and he killed 17 students and teachers. The survivors needed courage to go on and live. And they could have just healed, and it would have been understandable. But something different happened. A group of teenagers said, no more. They started a movement. They gathered millions of people on social media. They marched in the streets around the world. Some of you might have marched.
And one of the students, teenager Emma Gonzalez, in front of tens of thousands of people in Washington, D.C., she paused for a moment of silence, and she stood like this. Did that make you uncomfortable? That was five seconds. She did it for almost five minutes. And that was the length of the attack that killed her friends. If you’ve ever stood on stage or given a talk, that is really hard to do.
This, to me, is a story of turning that reactive courage into proactive courage, using the part that we all learn to do, to mourn, to live on, to console, and turning it into something more. And they inspired others. Teenager Greta Thunberg was just a girl sitting in front of her school with a sign striking for climate by herself. And she saw what the Parkland teens did. And so she created a giant movement. She was followed by millions of people. She stood in front of the UN, in front of the world’s leaders, and said, “Shame, shame on you.” This is contagious.
Corporate Courage
So imagine an epidemic of courage and empathy. The Parkland teens also inspired someone kind of unlikely. A guy named Ed Stack, and he was the CEO of a retailer in the US. And they sold guns to hunters. They sold the kind of gun that the killer used. But Ed said, no more. I can’t do this. We’re not going to sell these anymore. And it was risky. They had a billion dollars in sales to hunters. He faced death threats.
Now, I work with companies for a living, and this kind of courage is rare. It is lacking. Right now, companies are avoiding controversy. They’re not proudly protecting people’s rights, well-being, and our shared planet. So why did this CEO do it? He felt a responsibility. He wrote that somebody has to do something. And then he said, “I realized that somebody had to be me.”
Our Shared Responsibility
I want to share with you a quote that’s really kind of been a part of my existence for many years, and it comes from 2,000 years ago. “It’s not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.” We have enormous challenges, personal and global, and they can seem overwhelming. But we are not solely responsible. We can’t do it alone. We’re just partly responsible.
Cultivating Courage
So how do we get more courageous? How do we do this more? Well, first, you practice. Now, the metaphor of a muscle for things like willpower or courage, it isn’t a perfect metaphor. But if you do more, you at least know you can. And it may be small, medium-sized, everyday things, like eating more vegetarian meals to reduce your carbon impact, even if your friends don’t or find it silly. Maybe it’s voting for someone who will fight for equality and tackle climate change, even if your family wouldn’t. You can start somewhere and build on it.
You have to know that you matter. There’s some really interesting science on green consumers, the people who seek out sustainable products and will pay more for them. This group has a very high correlation between that behavior and the psychology of just believing that their actions matter. Now, we are all one of eight billion people. So technically, mathematically, no, our actions don’t matter. But of course they do. It’s both. It’s a duality that we live with.
So you can be an active citizen and not maybe just vote, but call, knock on doors, go talk to people. Third, I think mindfulness is really important because fear is normal. But instead of saying, “I am fearful,” you can say, “There is fear. I observe it, but I will not be owned by it.”
I think focusing on the human in our biggest issues is critical. It’s not just a principle or value that you might fight for. Helping the climate or democracy is just way too big. But reducing your impacts, voting for change, this helps people who may lose their home in a wildfire. There’s actual people at stake.
Take the long view. There’s no guarantee of success. Science also shows that we tend to judge courage on whether the action succeeds. And I say, don’t do that. Fight that bias because we won’t do the really hard things if we worry about success. We can’t know how it will end.
One of my favorite places in the world is Barcelona and La Sagrada Familia. This is a church that’s been under construction for 100 years. No one knows exactly when it’s going to be done. And people have lived and died working on this, not seeing the end. Now, action on the challenges I’ve been talking about, gun control, climate, democracy, inequality, all of that work has not succeeded yet. It’s not useless if you don’t see the change right away. You could be putting your brick in a much bigger spire.
The Power of Collective Courage
And finally, go together. Don’t go it alone. The most powerful enabler is collective courage. We have a powerful need to belong. It’s part of our psychology. Saying or doing something hard is hard because most people don’t. It takes us out of the comfort of the herd. But going together collectively leverages that natural need instead of fighting it. This is why sit-ins and protests can be so rewarding to be a part of.
And I’ve seen employees at companies use this. Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world. And for years, they really did nothing on climate change or energy. They were a laggard. But then employees spoke up. Thousands signed an open letter. They held rallies on the campus of the company. And it changed the company. Now Amazon is one of the biggest buyers of renewable energy in the world.
So we all can speak up in a company, an organization, our town, if something is not quite right. Or maybe the organization could live its values better. You know, we are connected and responsible to each other. We need courage to fight for a thriving world. And we can go together.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the Paralympics. There are amazing feats of athleticism. But one of my favorite sports is blind running, which is exactly what it sounds like. And these are world-class athletes running full speed without sight. If you’ve stood on one leg with your eyes closed, you can just imagine what this is like. It is difficult. But they can’t do it alone. They have a guide, someone who also runs very fast. And they are holding a rope, or they are literally taped together. And they have to be in sync. They have to work together.
Now, I don’t know if we will solve climate change, inequality, democracy. But I know that, win or lose, we must do it together. Thank you very much. Thank you.
