Many people have said “Hope is not a strategy”…or is it?
Like #Optimism, I think Hope is a spectrum and both approaches can be very useful as part of a strategy for achieving goals in business and life!
What I believe we need more of is “Rational Hope” and “Functional Optimism”, as we navigate living with this virus..
Ross Douthat wrote about “rational hope” in The New York Times on March 28.
“Rational hope accepts that the situation is genuinely dark, but then it still looks around for signposts leading up and out.
It recognizes that things are likely to get worse but keeps itself alert to the contexts in which they seem to be getting better—or at the very least, getting worse more slowly.”
Functional Optimism focuses on “what’s possible” – getting “best possible’ results.
It looks at the situation as it really is & analyses the resources that are available.
Then, we activate the powerful first three letters of Optimism – OPT!
Consciously choosing the next small step will progress us towards that “best possible” result.
Review, then step again!
Douthat concludes his article with “pandemics, from the 1918 Spanish flu to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, do end. Sometimes with seemingly unbearable numbers of deaths, but eventually they do end.”
We have no guarantees about when this one will end, but we can choose how we operate as we journey through it!
