Hey Guys- Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. With hope, we can endure almost anything, and certainly more than if we lose it or dont have it to begin with. In short, hope keeps us going. And that is the problem. When it comes to seeing reality, almost nothing gets in the way like a hope distortion, in either direction. First, if we are the kind to lose hope just because something looks difficult or bleak, we will accomplish little. Almost anything of value is only accomplished because someone kept going past the moment of thinking all is lost. This is the nature of heroic leadership and heroic life. As Admiral James Stockdale saw in his POW experience in Vietnam, hope is a requirement for survival and winning. Stockdales experience reminds leaders that you must recognize and own the brutal facts while at the same time never letting go of the determination that you are going to win, no matter how long it takes. In our discussion of getting to reality, notice how the time and hope dimension quickly enter into it, as Stockdale mentions. He says to recognize how bad it is and at the same time keep hope going, no matter how long it takes. Hope is always about holding on when it looks bad and being able to hold on sometimes for a long time. The time dimension if a key component, because if it did not require time, we would have no use for hope. We would already have everything we want, right now, today. But many times we do not have what we want right now and have to hold on to hope for quite some time, and then as we preserve, we succeed. Amazing, founded in 1994, did not make a profit until 2001. Investors and markets were losing hope and giving Jeff Bezos a very hard time, as he continued to have hope and try to convince others to have hope as well. Time would help and was built into the business model. He maintained hope as others lost it, and now Amazon is still around and thriving. He was right, and the ones without hope were wrong. So hope is good and requires time as part of its equation. But... that is also the problem: Hope buys time, and spend it. Hope is designed to give us more time, so that whatever we are hoping for can come to pass. But because that is what hope does for us - buys more time and spend it - it sometimes creates problems if we are not in touch with reality. In that case, it is hope that keeps us going down the road that has no realistic chance of being the right road or making what we want come to pass. In a false reality, hope is the worst quality you can have. Yet sometimes, people keep hoping, in spite of a clear reality staring them in the face. As Shimer tells it, reality was right there for all at Motorola to see. Digital was coming. But their profits gave them false hope that they could ride that wave forever. Their market share fueled the happiness of that hope and let them right into Nokias shadow. Just as hope can conquer all, false hope can ruin everything, as well. What Motorola needed was to see what a hopeless future analog really had and that if they continued to hope that it would sustain them, they were going to be in trouble. That kind of hope was a problem. False hope buy us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity. It is our biggest problem because not seeing the reality that needs to be dealt with is what is in between us and what we desire. And it is always our biggest opportunity because if we see it and grasp it, that reality, we can find a real way that will work, one rooted in things as they really are, to get what we desire. Cheers, Henry *Pages 84-86 from my book Necessary Endings
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 17:44:03 +0000