Not long ago I was signing books after speaking to a large crowd at a convention center. Whenever I speak, I try to make myself available to sign books, shake hands, and chat with people. This particular day the line was long, and I was signing as quickly as I could to try to get to everyone waiting.
A lady stepped up and handed me a book to sign, and she said, “For the last eight years I have been reading your books and listening to your teaching. You have given to me a wonderful gift, and I am grateful.”
I stopped writing and for a moment I wondered what that gift might be. Was it the simplicity of my teaching? Practicality? Humor? I was curious, so I asked, “What is the wonderful gift I have given you?”
“Hope.” She continued, “Whenever I read your books or listen to you, I leave with hope. Thank you.”
She took her book and left, but her words did not leave me. I was very grateful, because my desire is always to add value to people, and if she became more hopeful, then I felt I had indeed added value to her.
As you may know, leadership is one of my passions. I learn about it every day, and it is one of my great joys to teach it to others. Former cabinet member John W. Gardner said, “The first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive—the hope that we can finally find our way through to a better world—despite the day’s action, despite our own inertness, shallowness, and wavering resolve.” The great general Napoleon said even more simply: “Leaders are dealers in hope.”
As a leader and writer, I want to be someone who gives others hope. I believe that if a leader helps people believe the impossible is possible, it makes the impossible probable. So as you read this chapter, regardless of what losses you face or difficulties you must overcome, keep your head up. Losses in life are never fun, but there is one loss no one can afford to experience—the loss of hope. If you lose hope, that may be your last loss, because when hope is gone, so is motivation and the ability to learn.
In 1979 I wrote my first book, Think on These Things. It grew out of my desire to help people think upon the things that would build up their lives. One chapter was on the subject of hope. In it, I wrote the following words:
What does hope do for mankind?
In short, hope gives. It gives to us even when we have little or nothing left. It is one of the most precious things we have in life.
Hope is inspiring. It gives us the motivation for living and learning. I say that for several reasons:
Author and theologian Paul Tillich was asked about the central theme of his book The Courage to Be shortly before he died. Tillich said the book was about real courage: saying yes to life in spite of all the hardship and pain which are part of human existence. It takes courage to find something positive and meaningful about ourselves and life every day. That, he said, was the key to living life more fully. “Loving life,” he stated, “is perhaps the highest form of the courage to be.”
Where does a person find the courage to say yes to life? I believe it comes from hope. In life, you must expect trouble. You must expect adversity. You must expect conflict. But those facts don’t mean you have to lose hope. You can take the advice of Ann Landers, who said, “Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye, and say, ‘I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.’ ”
I believe that is what President Barack Obama did as he made his run for the White House in 2008. It was an important day in America’s history on January 20, 2009, when the first African-American became president of the United States. Regardless of your political leanings, that election answered a lot of questions about the color of people’s skin and their potential. That morning I picked up a newspaper and read the following full-page ad:
You can’t abolish slavery.
You can’t build a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
You can’t give women the right to vote.
You can’t fly an airplane from New York to Paris.
You can’t defeat Nazi Germany.
You can’t devise a plan to rebuild war-ravaged Europe.
You can’t cure polio.
You can’t allow black children and white children to go to school together.
You can’t put a man on the moon.
You can’t pass a Civil Rights act.
You can’t beat the Russians in hockey.
You can’t help bring down the Berlin Wall.
You can’t map the human genome.
You can’t elect a black man president of the United States.
What next, America? Because whatever it is, the answer is yes, we can.1
That day in America, hope was a beautiful thing. The word yes was on the lips of the people. That’s what hope does. Embrace it and it will empower you.
It’s been said that a person can live forty days without food, four days without water, four minutes without air, but only four seconds without hope. Why? Hope provides the power that energizes us with life. Hope is a powerful thing. It keeps us going when times are tough. It creates excitement in us for the future. It gives us reasons to live. It gives us strength and courage.
I think it’s no coincidence that people who suffer with depression often lack energy. Lack of hope and lack of energy usually go hand in hand. People who have a hard time believing in themselves have a difficult time finding the energy to cope with life and its challenges. In contrast, hope-filled people are energetic. They welcome life and all that it brings—even its challenges.
My dad loves to tell stories and jokes. One of his favorites goes like this:
“You look downhearted, old man. What are you worried about?” asked Joe.
“My future,” Bill replied.
“What makes your future look so hopeless?” was the question.
“My past,” was the answer.
Okay, now you know where I got my love for this kind of humor!
I can certainly identify with Bill. Perhaps you can, too. Our yesterdays have a tendency to invade our todays with negativism, stealing our joy and hope. If we dwell on them too much, they threaten to rob us of our future. That’s why I like these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Finish each day and be done with it…. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely.”
Hope always has a future. It leans forward with expectation. It desires to plan for tomorrow. And that opens us up to greater possibilities. There’s a story of a salesman from the eastern United States who arrived at a frontier town somewhere in the Old West. As the salesman was talking with the owner of the general store, a rancher came in. The owner excused himself to take care of the customer.
The rancher gave the storekeeper a list of things he needed, but he wanted credit to purchase them.
“Are you doing any fencing this spring?” asked the storekeeper.
“Sure am, Will,” said the rancher.
“Fencing in or fencing out?”
“Fencing in. Taking in another 360 acres across the creek.”
“Good to hear it, Josh. You got the credit. Just tell Harry out back what you need.”
The salesman was confused. “I’ve seen all kinds of credit systems,” he said, “but never one like that. How does it work?”
“Well,” said the storekeeper, “if a man’s fencing out, that means he’s on the defensive, just trying to keep what he’s got. But if he’s fencing in, he’s growing and getting bigger. I always give credit to a man who’s fencing in, because that means he’s got hope.”
Are you looking forward? Do you have hope for the future? If you have high expectations for tomorrow, then you probably want to meet it at your best. How do you do that? By growing, learning, and improving. Lack of hope breeds indifference toward the future. Hope brings motivation.
Recently I read No Ordinary Times, a biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II, written by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Many pages of the book were dedicated to England and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s leadership during the dark days of conflict with the Nazis.
Churchill certainly was a leader of hope to his people. As the Nazis swept across Europe and then mercilessly bombed England during the Blitz, the task of defeating Hitler and the Nazis seemed impossible. Yet, despite the odds against them, the British prevailed.
How was one relatively small nation, standing alone for quite a long time, able to withstand the Nazi onslaught? When Winston Churchill was asked what was England’s greatest weapon versus the Nazis, he responded with one word: hope.
Hope is our greatest asset and the greatest weapon we can use to battle our losses when they seem to be mounting. It is powerful, and that is why I call it a difference maker. What does hope do for us?
If you want to find the motivation to learn in the face of your losses, to keep working to get better tomorrow than you are today, to reach your potential and fulfill your purpose, then make use of the difference maker. Embrace hope.
Since hope is such a beautiful thing, this question has to be asked: “Can anyone have it?” The answer is yes! Regardless of your present situation, background, personality, upbringing, or circumstances, you can be a person of hope. Doing the following three things will help you to get there.
British clergyman G. Campbell Morgan told the story of a man whose shop had been burned in the great Chicago fire of 1871. The man arrived at the ruins the next morning carrying a table. He set up the table in the midst of the charred debris, and above it placed a sign that said, “Everything lost except wife, children, and hope. Business will be resumed as usual tomorrow morning.”2
That man’s response is one that I truly admire. After such a heavy loss, where did he get his hope? From his circumstances? Certainly not. From good timing? No. From other victims of the fire? There’s no indication that he did. How many others faced the future with such positive determination? If this man saw a bright future for himself and his family, it was because he made a choice to have hope.
Hope is in the DNA of men and women who learn from their losses. When times are tough, they choose hope, knowing that it will motivate them to learn and turn them from victims into victors.
Some people say choosing hope is a pie-in-the-sky approach to life. It’s unrealistic, they claim. I disagree. In The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks writes, “One of the most important distinctions I have learned in the course of reflection on Jewish history is the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.”3
I believe everyone is capable of choosing hope. Does it take courage? Yes. Because hope can be disappointing. But I am convinced that the courage of choosing hope is always rewarded.
In general we get what we expect in life. I don’t know why that is true, but it is. Norman Cousins remarked, “The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can’t scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.” If your expectations for life are negative, you end up experiencing a lot of negatives. And those negatives are compounded and become especially painful, because negative expectations cause a person not to learn from their losses. We become like the negative man who said, “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man on earth!”
That makes light of it, but negative thinking is really no laughing matter. The good news is that you don’t have to live with it. You can change your thinking from a negative mind-set, in which you feel hopeless, don’t learn from your losses, and are tempted to give up, to a positive mind-set, in which you believe things can get better, you learn from your mistakes, and you never quit.
Recently I met Bob Wosczyk during a break at one of my conferences. He gave me a copy of his book Who Says the Fat Lady Has to Sing? The reference to a fat lady comes from the opera because the finale of an opera is traditionally sung by the soprano, who was often heavyset. When she sings her incredible final solo, you know the opera is finished. But nowadays the phrase is used in reference to anything. People say “It’s not over until the fat lady sings” to mean there’s still time for the outcome to change. Bob takes exception to the idea that we ever give up, especially on our dreams. He writes:
We have all heard the expression, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings.” The implication here is that when the fat lady sings, the game is over and the will to continue fighting is lost. We choose to stay down on the canvas of life, afraid to get up and go another round because we are too beaten down to absorb any more punishment. We would rather quit on our dreams than continue to fight in pain, never knowing what could have been.
When we finally allow the fat lady to sing, we are forever haunted by the ghost of “What if?” “What if I quit too soon?” “What if I was on the right path, but then gave up too early?” “What if my very next action could have been the one that finally turned it all around?” “What if I could have lived the life I really wanted, rather than the life I had to settle for?”
The question I pose in this book is this: Why does it ever have to be over…? When did it become okay to give up, lay down, roll over, and attempt to sleep away our problems, losing our energy and enthusiasm for life? Who made quitting an option? Who says the fat lady has to sing?
What we don’t understand is that most people quit when they are just inches away from their goal. They never realize just how close they actually are to reaching their dream.4
Why do people give up as Bob describes? Because they lose hope. Their thinking is negative, their expectations are low, and they don’t know how to get out of that pattern. The answer may not be easy, but it is simple. They need to change the way they think about themselves and the losses they experience. In life, we see what we are prepared to see. That is a result of our thinking. What we see is what we get. And that determines the outcome in much of what we do.
My favorite baseball hitter of all time was Tony Gwynn, who played for the Padres when I lived in San Diego. Year after year he led the league in batting average. One time I attended a game with a friend of Tony’s. As we sat watching the game, Tony came up to bat and I said to Tony’s friend, “I love to watch him hit. Why do you think he’s so successful?”
“He expects to get a hit every time he bats,” the friend replied.
Did Tony always get a hit? Of course not. That’s impossible. The greatest hitters of all time fail six times out of ten. But those misses did not determine his expectation. He always believed in himself and his ability to get a hit. We should imitate him, because too often our main limitation comes from our expectations.
In his book The Making of the Achiever, Allan Cox wrote,
The achiever looks around the corner in anticipation of additional good things that await him. All he has to do, he believes, is show a little determination to get there. He rejects the notion of “can’t.” As a result, he is able to open more doors than others, strike better deals and attract more energetic and resourceful people to work with him. He sets higher standards and gets others to help him meet them. He wins confidence and nurtures vitality in others. He expects to succeed. When combined with desire, expectancy produces hope. And hope makes all things possible. Living the expectant life is simply an act of good judgment.
As I said, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. If you have been a negative thinker whose motivation has been rarely fueled by hope, then you must make a determination every day to try to renew your hope, change your thinking for the better, and believe that good things can and will happen to you. Doing these things can literally change your life.
If you are able to tap into your hope and become more positive in your thinking, that’s a great start. But it’s not enough. Positive thinking must be followed by positive doing. If you want to succeed big, then start by trying for a small victory. Nothing encourages hope like success.
If you are able to win small victories, it encourages you. It raises your morale. When you experience a win once, you begin to understand how it works. You get better at succeeding, and after winning several victories you begin to sense that bigger victories are nearly within your grasp.
Creating a positive environment with positive experiences can go a long way to encourage you to keep hoping, keep trying, and keep learning. Take a look at the difference between what happens when people sense victory and when they sense defeat:
| WHEN PEOPLE SENSE VICTORY | WHEN PEOPLE SENSE DEFEAT |
| They sacrifice to succeed. | They give as little as possible. |
| They look for ways to win. | They look for excuses. |
| They become energized. | They become tired. |
| They follow the game plan. | They forsake the game plan. |
| They help other team members. | They hurt others. |
Winning small victories can change your entire outlook on life. Neil Clark Warren, the founder of eHarmony, spent his earlier career counseling married couples. During that time he realized that his primary goal in counseling should be to help couples, even deeply troubled ones, to improve even a small amount. When couples see even a small improvement—as little as 10 percent—they gain hope. And hope is a powerful motivation for change and learning.
One of the most hopeful times in people’s lives is when they are looking forward to the birth of a child. The world of possibilities for that child seems nearly limitless, especially for a child born in a free country, like the United States, that offers so many opportunities. The parents of Jim Abbott were hopeful, even though they were little more than kids themselves when Jim was born. But their optimism for Jim was also shaken when they discovered that their brand-new baby boy was born without a right hand.
Jim’s parents, Mike and Kathy, sought answers for the birth defect. So did their doctors. But they never found a specific reason for it. It was something that had merely happened, and the teenage parents had to find a way to deal with it.
Jim played like a normal kid, and he didn’t seem to be slowed down too much by the absence of a hand, but when he got to be five, the experts advised Mike and Kathy to send him to the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids, more than one hundred miles away from their home in Flint, Michigan, so that he could be fitted with a prosthesis and be trained to use it. Back in those days, that meant a hook.
Jim’s parents followed the advice, and Jim did receive a hook and learn to use it. He worked at it alongside kids with severe disabilities, such as a child who was learning to brush her teeth with her feet—because she had no arms. But there came a moment in the hospital when they realized that Jim didn’t really belong there. Their best hope would be to treat him as a normal kid. Jim’s parents removed him from the hospital and took him home.
During the drive home, Mike told Kathy, “We don’t have a problem. We’ve got a blip on the screen. We can handle this. We could make it a problem if we want it to be a problem. But, it’s no problem anymore.”5 Jim later wrote, “On that two-hour trip to Flint [going home from the children’s hospital], we’d get our strength back. Mom and Dad felt hope, even optimism, for the first time beginning to focus not on what I lacked but what I had.”6
Two of the things Jim had were a love for sports and good athletic ability. When Jim was six, his father bought him a baseball glove. He loved it. He spent hours throwing a rubber baseball at a brick wall, bettering his aim and arm strength, and figuring out how to get his glove from his right arm onto his left hand so that he could field the ball when it bounced back. Once he came up with a system, he kept improving his speed and fluidity. As he got better, he stood closer to the wall so that he had to make the transition more quickly to catch the ball.
Baseball wasn’t Jim’s only love. He played every sport. He’d go out with the neighborhood boys and be part of every pickup game. At first, nobody would pick him. There were times when he came home discouraged and wanted to give up. But his dad wouldn’t allow it. Mike would send his son back out to the playground to keep trying. He had hope for Jim and wanted him to learn to persevere and overcome obstacles. He was preparing Jim for the road ahead.
Jim says, “The thing about a disability is, it’s forever.”7 It’s not going away, so you have to learn how to deal with it. How did Jim do that? He played every sport and did everything he could to improve himself. And he started to get some recognition because he was good—so good, in fact, that he dreamed of someday playing baseball at the highest level, an aspiration he shared for the first time publicly when he was twelve. “It seemed like a lot to hope for, but I had plenty of hope, and plenty of help,” Jim explains.8
“I was no prodigy. I was cut from the freshman basketball team at Flint Central High School. I made the freshman baseball team, but didn’t get a hit the whole season. It was a long time before I separated myself from boys my age on athletic fields,” says Jim.9 But separate himself he did. As a high school sophomore, he played varsity baseball. When he was a junior, the coach told him he was the ace. Jim batted .367 that year and helped his team become city champions.
That year his coach also recruited him to play football as the backup quarterback. He was reluctant, but his coach insisted. Jim ended up starting in the playoffs and nearly took the team to a state championship.
As a senior, Jim played first base, pitched (winning ten games with an ERA of 0.76), and batted cleanup (.427 average). His team won the conference championship, and the Toronto Blue Jays drafted him. But Jim had his heart set on playing for the University of Michigan, which he did for three years. He was an All-American, winning two Big Ten championships. And he played on the Olympic baseball team. He pitched the gold-medal game in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
Jim’s dream came true when he was again drafted, this time by the California Angels. He was the eighth pick of the 1988 draft. He expected to spend a long time in the minors, working his way up. But much to his surprise, he made the major league roster on opening day of his first year as a member of the starting rotation of pitchers.
Jim played major league baseball for ten years. Some seasons he was fantastic. Other years he struggled. A particular highlight of his professional career was the no-hitter he pitched in 1993 at Yankee Stadium. There were many things about playing major league baseball that he misjudged or didn’t expect. But the thing that turned out surprising him the most was the attention he got from children with disabilities similar to his.
Jim remembered what a thrill it was for him to meet a major league ballplayer, so the fact that kids would want to talk to him or get his autograph wasn’t a surprise. But he didn’t expect parents and their physically challenged kids to seek him out as they did. Jim wrote,
I didn’t see them coming, not in the numbers they did. I didn’t expect the stories they told, or the distance they traveled to tell them, or the desperation revealed in them.
They were shy and beautiful, and they were loud and funny, and they were, like me, somehow imperfectly built. And, like me, they had parents nearby, parents who willed themselves to believe that this accident of circumstances or nature was not a life sentence, and that the spirits inside these tiny bodies were greater than the sums of their hands and feet.10
Jim read and answered every letter sent to him by one of these children or their parents. He would stop whatever he was doing in the clubhouse whenever Tim Mead, then the PR manager for the Angels (and now the club’s vice president of communications), would poke his head in and say, “Hey Jim, got a minute?” Jim would go out to meet children and spend a few minutes talking with them. He’d find out what position they played, ask how they batted, ask them to show him how they worked their glove. And Jim would talk to the parents:
I would tell them about my parents. They’d made me feel special for what I was, and yet treated me like I was every other kid from the neighborhood. I would tell them about my frustrations, and their words, “This is something to be lived up to.” I asked them to see that that, and so much else, were possible, and amazing things could happen. My parents had done that for me, and they could do the same for their boy.”11
Jim says he never turned down a single child, even when he was exhausted or discouraged or busy. Why? He wanted to give them hope! He wanted them to understand that so much was possible for them. Jim says, “I knew these kids and I knew how far a little boy or girl could run with fifty words of reassurance.”12
Jim retired from baseball in 1999. In his career he pitched 1,674 innings, struck out 888 batters, and won 87 games.13 He had lived out a dream, one that few people would have thought possible. He gave himself to baseball, and baseball gave him a lot in return. Jim sums up, “Maybe the greatest gift [from baseball] was that it helped me come to peace with the burden of being different.” But he also points out, “The lesson had to be learned through losing, painful as it was.”14
How was Jim Abbott able to learn from his losses? Because he had hope. He kept believing, and he kept trying. Hope provided the motivation for learning. And he used that motivation to learn more and go farther than others believed was possible. That is the power of hope.