Page, Arizona
November 15, 2020
I love this week’s message from Gary Burnison. Hope is a verb and it means to reset and recharge. It means each morning, no matter what happened yesterday we can carpe diem. Hunger and hustle.
Here’s his missive:
All of my children are hoping for something right now. For my youngest, it’s about getting into a “good” college (whatever that means). My college-age daughter’s hopes are for a good job next year. My son longs for an end to the lockdown so he can enjoy some normalcy before he is deployed. For my oldest daughter, it’s about a relationship working out. And, for the next daughter, her hopes are much more intense as she focuses all her thoughts on two dear friends—newlyweds, one of whom was severely injured in an auto accident.
We are all hoping for something, but hoping alone is not a strategy. When we’re caught up in hoping, we’re focused on the future, which means we may not accurately perceive nor fully cherish today.
Every day, we reset to zero—recalibrating everything from our emotions to our expectations. Along the way, we also redefine hope. We’ve come to realize that hope is not a rescue—magically transforming our lives. Rather, hope is a recharge—an infusion of resiliency.
The other day, as I walked on the beach, I watched the sunset. As the sun sank lower to the horizon, the sky changed from pink to orange to red. The light dimmed to darkness, and then it was gone. I could practically time it—like a curtain quickly closing on that waning day.
How different is sunrise. We don’t perceive the exact moment of the sun rising because all we see is the growing intensity of light. Then, we have no choice but to turn our attention from the horizon to the day ahead.
As we seize the day, do we want to waste our time clinging to the false hope of recreating what once was? Or do we invest our time resetting hope, grounded in what is and what will be?
It is human nature to want to go back in time—to when we were young, our children were still growing up, loved ones were still with us. We tell ourselves we would make different choices—play more, enjoy more, be more present. We’d give anything to go back to those days, but none of us get that extra lap around the track, to rewind Father Time.
It is this moment—right here, right now. If we want to be hopeful about tomorrow, we need to reset how we show up today. Hope requires hustle to turn possibilities into opportunities. That’s why, throughout this pandemic, our hope has not just been in the science. Nor have those scientists diligently working on vaccines and treatments relied on hope. The saving grace has been the resilience of the human spirit, even through the most difficult of times.
Hope is not just a noun—it’s also a verb. Hope is not a wish or a want—it is willpower. Hope is not a promise—it is a purpose. Hope is not merely our lifeline—it is our life raft. Here are some thoughts:
H.O.P.E. It can be a gamechanger—Harvesting Opportunities and Possibilities Every day. Every day, we have to dream about the possibilities for a different tomorrow and, at the same time, pursue opportunities that emerge from the choices we make—that is, if we’re willing to empower ourselves and others. Opportunity and potential are inextricably linked. Without opportunity, none of us know our potential. Hope means being in the opportunity business. Harvesting those opportunities is about making decisions on the things we can control. The fact is, there are those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who ask, “What happened?”
Where there’s hope, there’s hustle. If we want to manifest hope, it takes hustle. That’s why the most important qualities I look for in new employees are hunger and hustle. Over the years, I’ve noticed that hunger starves complacency and hustle quashes pedigree every time. We commit to a say/do ratio of 1-to-1—saying what we mean and doing what we say. That’s the best way to give others hope—through trust in our words and belief in our actions. It’s not enough to talk about it—we have to be about it.
Hope…and second chances. It started out as a routine business meeting when Linda Hyman, our firm’s Executive Vice President, Global Human Resources, traveled to Boston in January 2019. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, Linda dropped her papers. Alarmed by what they were witnessing, our colleagues, Doug Charles and Jonathan Kuai, asked, “Linda, are you all right?” Their concern became more urgent when she replied in a slurred voice, “I’m fine.” Linda later learned that everyone rushed into action: calling 9-1-1 and getting her to one of a few hospitals that had the expertise and technology to save her life. Within an hour Linda was undergoing a new procedure known as thrombectomy to extract a 2-inch clot from her mid-cerebral artery. She had a complete recovery, but Linda was changed in different ways. As she told me this week, “I just feel like the universe conspired to give me hope—by bringing together the most magical array of people to recognize, then treat, and ultimately save me. I feel hopeful every day that I am here, doing something meaningful to honor that.
Over the centuries, humans have conquered so much—not through false hope or wishful thinking, but with science and innovation. This perspective is good for recalibrating our thinking—to remember that rockets didn’t take us to the moon; the dreamers and engineers did. The internet didn’t create a globally networked economy; it was the innovators and creators. In the same way, a vaccine in a vial won’t end the pandemic; the researchers, scientists, and everyone on the front lines will. That, indeed, is a reason to reset hope.