Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (15 page)

No one type of person has cornered the market on hope. It is an equal-opportunity resource available to everyone. Whatever your present circumstances, you can create some momentum toward a desired future.

I’ve met plenty of people who have a hard time recruiting hope, usually because they feel overwhelmed by what’s going on right now. When this is the case, I ask two questions that can help them reconnect with their agency.

“Who makes you feel like you matter?” This may be someone in your life right now: a friend, a teacher, a child, a relative. It may also be a person in your past who made you feel understood, valued, and encouraged. It may even be someone who has passed away. If the person is living, make an effort to contact and spend time with him or her. If the person has died, use photos and memories to help you gain access to the warmth and energy of their support. These important people can give you the energy and determination you need to move forward. In a sense, you can borrow agency from them until you feel your own strength returning.

“What really matters to you?” This question reminds you of what is important to you and what you have to offer the world. For many people, the answer taps into their deepest values and passions. “It matters that I care about helping people.” “It matters that I love my family.” “It matters that I want an education.” “It matters that I love to sing.” Other people mention a vocation or skill. “It matters that I am a good cook (or office manager, or father, or . . . ).” Sometimes people name an object or place that has deep significance to them: a family home, their church, a sports trophy, a book they loved as a child, an heirloom.

Whenever you recall what matters most to you, you reconnect with your sense of identity and purpose, which can spark you to take hopeful action.

I
MAGINE THAT
your job is to invest millions of dollars every year in the best start-ups that come your way. The job is yours as long as you pick the successful companies and pass on the losers. What do you use for your selection criteria? How do you decide which entrepreneurs get funded and which ones don’t? How much risk do you take on?

Joe Kraus, an investing partner at Google Ventures, is responsible for finding technology start-ups that dream up new gadgets and mobile and gaming services. Most entrepreneurs have their fair share of failure stories, but Kraus picks his winners by listening to plans for their new business, not stories about why their old business failed. As he puts it, “I’m first and foremost far more interested in their current idea than what happened in the past, so in the meeting with the entrepreneurs I actually don’t spend a ton of time on what have they learned from their past experience. I’m much more interested in how are they thinking about their current business.”

Kraus also looks for people who leverage both hope and fear about what’s next. “In my mind, the ones who have no fear of failure are merely the dreamers, and the dreamers don’t build great companies. The people
who thread the line between vision and being able to execute and having this healthy fear of failing that drives them—not paralyzes them, but drives them—to be more persistent, to work harder than the next person—that’s a magic formula.” He says, in conclusion, “I think failure in the culture [of Silicon Valley] means you just haven’t gotten your success yet.”

When a big venture capitalist challenges a commonly held belief about behavior, I sit up and pay attention. This is because, when I was a graduate student in psychology, we were taught the following as a general truth:
Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Known as Meehl’s maxim, after the University of Minnesota psychologist Paul Meehl, it has been tested and retested for more than fifty years.
Study after study suggests that skilled experts using their best professional judgment couldn’t predict future performance any better than (or, in many cases, even as well as) a few simple measures like past grades or recent scores on a test of ability. (This was one point of Daniel Kahneman’s story—in
chapter 6
—about his attempts to evaluate the leadership potential of Israeli army soldiers.)

This principle has become deeply embedded in our lives, and I mean
all
of our lives, not just the lives of psychologists. It guides decision makers from college admissions committees to parole boards to loan officers. Financial experts use it to pick stocks and mutual funds. Human resources pros review applicants’ job records looking for past brilliance. Law enforcement agents build current cases around a suspect’s past offenses. And I’ll bet you can hear some version of the same maxim on
SportsCenter,
The Suze Orman Show
, and
Dr. Phil
all in the same afternoon.

Meehl’s maxim is attractive because it offers a simple solution to the complex problem of selecting the right person, whether for a job or a wanted poster:
the past is the best predictor of future behavior
. For psychologists, the idea carried even more weight because of the legacy of Sigmund
Freud, whose model led psychoanalysts to spend years digging around in patients’ pasts for the causes of current problems. Yet this mostly left people “
unduly embittered about their past and unduly passive about their future,” as University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, a leader of the positive psychology initiative, has pointed out.

Studying the science of hope with Rick Snyder pointed me in a new direction, as did Stern’s San Antonio study, which showed that the key factor in how long people lived was how they thought about the future. Hope made the difference that standard measures just didn’t capture.

In the search for sure investments, great employees, and bad apples, we have to start somewhere. The past is accessible and rich in detail. But even when the past is a predictor, it’s actually not a very good one. That’s because all behavior, whether it is how fast you will run a race, how well you do on a test, or how successful you will be on the job, is multiply determined. In other words, how any of us perform on a given day has more than one cause, and there are still big gaps in our understanding of what drives life’s major outcomes.

Retired four-star United States Army general Colin Powell has earned numerous military, civilian, and foreign honors. He served in four presidential administrations in a variety of roles, including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state.
In his leadership book,
It Worked for Me,
he recalls that foreign military leaders often asked him, “
When did you graduate from West Point?”—the obvious pedigree for someone of his accomplishments. But he didn’t go to West Point, or any other famous American military institution, because, when Powell was entering college, a black person couldn’t attend those schools. Powell attended the City College of New York, the free public college in Harlem, not far from where he was born. As Powell puts it in his book, “
My city believed that kids like me deserved a shot at the top.”

Powell says he was a mediocre student at CCNY, with one exception: his outstanding performance in ROTC. It was his A in ROTC that got his average up to just above 2.0, which allowed him to qualify for graduation.

ROTC had given Powell his vocation and he had risen to the top through the rigorous and frequent evaluation reports that determine every Army promotion. Nevertheless, “Potential, Not Just Performance” is the title of his chapter on evaluation. “
Past performance alone does not adequately predict future performance,” he writes. “Sure, if past performance is mediocre or worse, satisfactory or outstanding performance in the future is extremely unlikely, and if past performance ranges from better than satisfactory to outstanding, chances are good that the performance in the future will continue at that level. But it’s not a sure thing.”

Powell explains the qualities leaders and bosses should use to select the best candidates for a position, criteria that smack of the future focus, can-do spirit, and positive relationships demonstrated by hopeful people in every profession. They include: “
Learning and growing intellectually . . . preparing for the next level” and “Reaching outside his comfort zone to acquire skills and knowledge that are not now essential, but are useful at a higher level.” He writes that a person who is “[c]onfident about the next step . . . mentally prepared . . . balanced” and “[e]njoys the respect and confidence of his contemporaries” should be given special consideration.

Powell ends with a strong caution for anyone who is responsible for evaluating others: “
Always be prepared to change your mind, however firmly made up, when dealing with those infinitely faceted beings we call people.”

Because of these findings of positive psychology—and our own observations—my research colleagues and I focus on two things that add up to predict success at school and work: history and hope. We have considered how past grades and test scores plus hope predict college grades, work productivity, and staying power (graduating from school or keeping a job). In our research (introduced in
chapter 4
), the links between
history, hope, and educational outcomes are becoming clear (see
chapter 14
).
Indeed, in samples of grade school, high school, and college students, hope is directly related to academic achievement. Specifically, hope relates to higher achievement test scores for grade school children and higher GPAs for college and law students. The predictive power of hope adds to that accounted for by intelligence in children and by previous grades and scores on entrance exams (the ACT, SAT, and LSAT) for college and law students. In a six-year longitudinal study, the hope scores of entering college freshmen predicted better overall GPAs, adding to what is known about entrance exam scores. Maybe it is time for college recruiters to look beyond how students stack up on standardized tests and also consider how they think about big goals and go about pursuing them.

History and hope add up. The stories we tell about our future lives are, in part, a product of our past accomplishments and the identity we have created to summarize our history. Developing our best possible future selves requires an unvarnished assessment of who we have been and of how that relates to who we want to be. It also may require us to acknowledge our fears.

I used to believe that people could be divided into the hopeful and the fearful. I also thought that hope for the future was the primary motivator for success, whereas fear led to a seat on the sidelines of life. Then one day early in my career as a psychology professor, a colleague and I were debating what leads to a good outcome in the classroom. “Before I teach a large class,” I said, “I think about the one hard-to-reach student and come up with multiple ways to make the material come alive.” My colleague laughed. “When I am in front of a big room full of students,” he said, “I am dreading that I look stupid. I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to not look like an idiot.” It was my turn to laugh. I had to admit how much classroom energy I invested in managing students’ impressions of me. Fear was part of my teaching formula, too.

A nasty case of West Nile virus was another lesson in hope and fear. During my year-long recovery, I tried to set daily rehab goals, but quickly discovered they could make my lingering pain worse and even cause new problems. Was walking down to the end of the block a doable goal? Well, I got there, but I had to sit down in a neighbor’s yard for twenty minutes before I could make the sloth-like trek back to my front door.

Once I started socializing and teaching again, my hopes for connecting with others were balanced with anxiety over answering questions about an exotic illness and doing my job well. Fortunately, concern and support from my wife, friends, colleagues, and students helped me reenter my life.

It seemed that, when I was able to balance hope and fear, my health improved at a steady pace. When my high hopes weren’t held in check, I exercised too much and suffered for it. When fear trumped hope, I became a recluse, withdrawing from friends, family, and profession.

Choosing hope and managing fear is hard work that never lets up. It is the work of a lifetime. We humans will always be hope-fear hybrids.

Fear signals come from one of the oldest parts of the brain, the amygdala, which automatically triggers a whole-body response that gives us the resources we need to fight back, make tracks, or play dead (otherwise known as “fight, flight, or freeze”). Fear makes us behave as if we have blinders on, seeing only the most obvious options—which may be the ones we need most.

When fear does its job, we escape what scares us. But this response is exhausting, and it comes with a host of negative emotional and physical consequences.

Hope, in contrast, depends on the youngest part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex (see
chapter 3
). When we attach ourselves to the future through a goal that matters to us, our brain tells us to reach out, find more resources, and get some support. In effect, hope takes the blinders off and helps us see opportunity.