encourage courage

on one of my many walks outside the office to avoid work inside the office, i thought of the words courage and encourage which sound so similar yet seem so far apart.

i would say i have approximately no courage. there are a few people at work with courage. one who is very smart. he speaks bluntly, yet is almost always correct.

i envy them. the good envy where i want to practice to be more like them.

then i saw challenger, the film based on richard feynman and his position on the enquiry into discovering the reason why challenger exploded. he had courage. he was a genius. so he was almost always right.

i don't think i'm that smart. i know that there are many many people better at anything i can do. so how can i speak up when i'm not always right?

in order to do so, i would need an injection of self esteem, and this would probably be in the form of encouragement. and then i realised of the link between courage and encouragement. encouragement > self esteem > courage to speak up and stand up for what you believe.

maybe however, it's all in my head, which was filled at the time with great boredom and perhaps i'm seeing links which aren't there.