[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Courage is the skill of powering through resistance (fear, anger pain) toward a defined objective. It takes courage to build a family or business, stay in school, keep a steady job, and not get derailed when adversity strikes. Without courage nothing substantial can ever be achieved. Here I’ve transcribed a short clip in which Academy Award-Winning Actor Morgan Freeman shares his view with CNN’s Don Lemon that courage is the key to life itself.
Transcript:
Freeman: I don’t think wealth and genetics have anything to do with each other actually. If you are born in the US, it really doesn’t matter the condition of your birth. What matters is what you inherit from your nurturing, from your environment from the standpoint of having been born with little. Here you can always get out of there.
Lemon: But environment affects.
Freeman: Say you are born as one of the untouchables in India, there you are. If you’re born into the super rich, there you are. Here you can be born into the super rich, but three or four generations down the line it’s gone.
Lemon: Here’s a stat from your show: the richest 85 people on this planet have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion.
Freeman: That’s on the planet, however.
Lemon: It’s not far off in America.
Freeman: No, it isn’t far off in America. But we still here don’t abandon the idea that it isn’t finite. It isn’t finite. Where were you born?
Lemon: Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Baton Rouge General Hospital.
Freeman: Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. I had a long haul from where I came from to here. But here we are. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and here we sit at the dining table.
Lemon: It’s hard when you say that to some people, because they say “There you go with the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps thing,’ and, you know, you’re just being respectable. Not everyone can do that.”
Freeman: Bullsh*t. Everybody can. Courage is the key to life itself. There are a lot of people who were born in situations, and they say, “I’ll never get out of this,” and so they won’t. I say to people who say “I would like to have done so-and-so-and-so. I say, “Well, you could have done it.” They say “Well, I couldn’t get out of here.” Man, the bus runs every day.