If you ask someone, "Can you pick me up at 7?" and they reply "I hope so," how confident do you feel about that ride? If someone tells you "I hope I don't have a cold," do you really want to share her latte?
The Obama campaign incorporated "hope" into much of its monologue....and I think it caught people's attention because it hit a nerve, a longing for something better, something different. Like the word "change," "hope" is a nebulous concept that for many people, sits out there somewhere. Hey, cool, I can "hope" for "change" ...and never step up to do what I need to do to get there.
Hope won't help you pass a test. Hope won't pay the rent. Hope won't build your muscles. Hope won't let you play a concerto. Hope won't cure cancer. Hope won't bring in the mail.
Work. Effort. Vision. Passion. Trust. Love. Action. Perseverence. Put these in your arsenal, and you will find your way to any goal.
Alexander Pope said "hope springs eternal"... I think for most of the world hope springs EXTERNAL. If you expect your hope to come from out there, then it is passive and weak.
Turn it around. Make it a verb not a noun.....we don't need to "have" hope, we need to "DO" hope --- with action and effort.
"If we continue to pursue hope then we had best become a producer of it, rather than a consumer of it. Let it be an offer rather than a demand. Let us offer hope to our leaders, since we create them, because they need all the support they can get."
- Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes
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