You Are What You Won’t Do For Money [Ryan Holiday] – “Do you know who Audie Murphy is? He’s the most decorated soldier in American history. Before he turned 21, he fought in nine campaigns, was wounded three times, and received 33 medals for valor—including the Medal of Honor, three Purple Hearts, and every combat decoration the Army offers. Once, against an onslaught of 250 German soldiers and six tanks, Murphy ordered his men to fall back to safety—alone, he climbed into a burning tank destroyer and used its single machine gun to hold off the Nazis for over an hour, single-handedly killing 50 of them, refusing to give an inch of ground, holding the woods until reinforcements came. (Read his memoir, To Hell and Back…it’s incredible.)
After the war, he became an actor and a musician. In 1968, he did another courageous deed: he turned down enormous sums of money to appear in a series of cigarette and alcohol commercials. “How would it look: ‘War Hero Drinks Booze’?” he said. “I couldn’t do that to the kids.””