Chapter Thirty-Seven
Choose Hope
On Creating a Hopeful Future
Hope is as far from wishful thinking as you can get. Hope involves believing deeply, seeing further, thinking conditionally, and acting willfully to make things happen. Be vulnerable to possibility—let down your guard—and have the courage to believe in the power of hope.
Choose hope. But also know that by opting to use the most sustainable form of human motivation, you are also choosing to use the most challenging. Odd as it may seem, it takes courage to be hopeful. As Simon Peter advised, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15). As Peter suggests, it is best to assume that as a hopeful person, you will be an oddity to others. But don’t waste your time trying to convert the fatalists. Seek out the hopeful, the willful, and the courageous. They already know the truth, but need your leadership to act upon it.
Moreover, while we recognize that there is always hope, we often forget about the importance of hope once we have accomplished what we had hoped to achieve. Like a professional football player’s silent shout of “Hi, Mom” into the television cameras following a touchdown, hope, like Dad, is often forgotten in the trappings of success. In hope’s place, we opt to credit hard work, intelligence, and often luck rather than the power of belief, imagination, and will. It’s as if we are reluctant to give ourselves credit for the dream that gave rise to our will to work in pursuit of that dream. The irony of hope is that everyone loves a dreamer, but no one wants to be called one.
Almost all outrageously successful people, at some point in their journey, were dismissed by doers as dreamers. However, the joke is on the doers. What the doers often overlook is that they are employed by a dreamer who has found a way. Truth be told, in moments of uncertainty, we look to the hopeful dreamer—the problem solver, the creative one, the person who can find a way out of our current dilemma. When it really matters, we turn to hopeful leaders like flowers reaching for the sun.
Hopeful leaders turn the unbelievable into the expected. As the late movie critic Gene Siskel, a die-hard Chicago Bulls fan, once said of Michael Jordan’s supreme talent (or words to this effect), “People keep saying how unbelievable he is. You’d think after they have seen him do so many unbelievable things season after season, game after game, and shot after shot, they’d begin to believe.” When the ball was in Jordan’s hands, saving the game at the buzzer was not only believable but expected.
To be human is to hope. To hope is to see with your heart. To lead in the face of uncertainty is to have the courage to act on your seeing heart—to create the future rather than wait for it to come to you. In these definitive moments of leadership, be awake to possibility. When in doubt, go inside for guidance but leave the screen door open for sustenance. When it is said by those who have tried and failed that it can’t be done and by those who have feared to try that it will never work, learn to believe. And when you ultimately, finally, and with every ounce of your being make your decision and place your bet on a future so abundant in promise that you can taste it, choose hope, rise, and stand tall. Throw off the bowlines. Unleash the hounds. Step off the curb. Shine.
Andrew Razeghi is the founder of Andrew Razeghi Companies, LLC; adjunct associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and vice chairman of the Wright Centers of Innovation Review Panel at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.