“Courage means being scared but doing it anyway” seems like a pretty succinct way of putting it I think.

My wierd compliment (if it can be called that) was when I was in high school English class. My teacher noticed how competent I was and how I was the only one to consistently raise my hand when he asked a question. He gave us a research paper to do and I got an F on it, exclusively because I fucked up the citations. He said the content was good, but he had to mark me way down due to improper citing. He said “I know you can do better than this.”

Is that a complement? Either way, I think about that interaction and scenario a lot even though I haven’t been in high school for well over a decade.