It is also more practical. The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most afraid. And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them. He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare to do. They wonder what such a man thinks. If he dares stand up before them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking? What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have some man-stuff in it. They prefer to wait and see what he thinks. Courage consists in not being afraid of one's own mind and of other people's minds. When men become so afraid of one another's minds and of their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and fight. They are cowards. They do not know what they think. They do not know what they want. CHAPTER XI THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE I have never known a coward. I have known men who did cowardly things and who were capable of cowardly thoughts, but I have never known a man who could be fairly and finally classified as a coward. Courage is a process. If people are cowards it is because they are in a hurry. They have not taken the pains to see what they think. The man who has taken the time to think down through to what he really wants and to what he is bound to get, is always (and sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly) a courageous man. It is the man who is half wondering whether he really wants what he thinks he wants or not, or whether he can get it or not, who is a coward. The coward is a half man. He is slovenly minded about himself. He gets out of the hard work of seeing through himself, of driving on through what he supposes he wants, to what he knows he wants. So, after all, it is a long, slow, patient pull, being a courageous man. Few men have the nerve to take the time to attend to it. The first part of courage consists in all this hard work one has to put in on one's soul day after day, and over and over again, doggedly, going back to it. _What is it that I really want?_ The second, or more brilliant-looking part of courage, the courageous act itself (like Roosevelt's when he is shot), which everybody notices, is easy. The real courage is over then. Courage consists in seeing so clearly something that one wants to get that one is more afraid of not getting it than one is of anything that can get in the way.