Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (17 page)
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Authors: Shane J. Lopez
Inspired by the design and development process at Apple, Sonos has gone to great lengths to create a product that is radically simple. “There are always obstacles to overcome,” MacFarlane said. “Software, mechanical, and acoustic engineers have to work together” to produce a best-in-class system.
While I have not been able to sample Frederick’s burger or buy one of Demars’s suits, my Sonos system has increased my enjoyment of music at least tenfold, because it made listening to music easy. Setup of the hardware took minutes and the wireless connectivity just happened. Every song I can think of is accessible through one of Sonos’s partners, such as Rhapsody, Spotify, and Sirius. And its controller is on my phone (thanks to a free downloadable app), which means . . . well, it’s just cool.
Sonos, a private company, continues to grow. It also has become a magnet for resources (raising $135 million in private equity funding in
June 2012) and talent (hiring a former executive of BlackBerry to be Sonos’s chief commercial officer and drawing a former top Microsoft executive out of retirement and on to Sonos’s board of directors). Sonos is an example of one of the many high-risk businesses that offset fear of failure with capital, talent, and hope.
Entrepreneurs and the Elements of Hope
Whether they are honchoing food trucks, pop-ups, or bigger companies, the heads of successful start-ups are the most hopeful of the enterprising bunch. Their bold goals are realized because their agency and pathways seem limitless even in the face of fear, adversity, and risk.
Goals:
Many people are visited with a brilliant idea now and again, but high-hope people have a type of creativity that churns out big ideas. Their hopeful thinking spikes when they are asked to make the future better, when they grapple with today’s problems, and when they realize that a big obstacle is challenging someone’s progress. They also are gifted at sharing their big idea with other people, including partners, employees, investors, and consumers. They craft a right-risk vision that excites them, inspires others, and manages risk.
Agency:
When the going gets tough, hopeful entrepreneurs get more energized. Their enthusiasm and confidence inspire others. Their fund of agency may seem bottomless because they are great recruiters of energy needed to get things done.
Pathways:
People high in hope are adept at dealing with change. This is because they more readily experience the positive emotions that open their minds to ways they can move forward, solving problems along the way. They don’t let risk run wild and create the fear that will stymie creativity. High-hope business leaders interpret obstacles as opportunities. So when they face tough problems, they come up with more and better solutions.
“How do I get from here to there?” In the age of GPS, MapQuest, and Google Maps, we hardly have to think about this when traveling to a new place. In daily life, however, answering this is still crucial. I’ve seen students, entrepreneurs, and couples fail because they had not thought beyond the first step of their plan. Without a good plan and a Plan B, you just won’t find your way. And without a Plan B, you won’t bounce back from setbacks or failure.
Plan B’ing is made stronger with practice. Think about a goal you are working on now. What is your plan for attaining it? That’s Plan A. What’s Plan B? And C? Are those the best plans you can think of? Revise each of them to make them better. Doing this each time you are in pursuit of a goal makes it easier to create pathways to your future.
In the next part of this book, we’ll be looking at very specific tools, strategies, and skills for making hope happen. Many of these are backed by new research on goal-setting, on building agency, and on pathways thinking.
Making Your Goals Come Alive
I
F TIME
machines existed, I would buy a fast one with a preview screen that shows what is happening where I’m planning to visit; I want to land on the right side of history and out of harm’s way.
But until Old Doc Brown works out the bugs in his DeLorean’s flux capacitor, our bodies are grounded in the present. So we have to rely on the next-best thing—our capacity to travel back in time and into the future in our minds. Futurecasting—how well we can preview the future—is
the
fundamental skill for making hope happen.
Most people begin taking short mental trips into the future the moment they wake up. You might start thinking about the first sip of coffee, your 10
A.M.
meeting, an important afternoon errand, a family dinner.
Of the twenty thousand chunks of experience your brain registers each day, more than a third of them are spent time traveling into the future.
Our longer trips into the future, focused on big life goals, shape our choices. Should we stay on the charted path or take entertaining (but
possibly unproductive) side trips? If you went to college believing that you would get a good job when you graduated, you probably visited the future, considered your many options, and then chose a major that would get you where you wanted to go. When you open a retirement account, you probably fantasize about how you will spend your savings and your much-deserved free time in the future. If you exercise and eat well today because you think it will make you live longer and better, you are a health-conscious time traveler.
So let’s put your ability to move through time to the test. Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you stand at this time? On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?
This ladder exercise, or “best possible life” question, is not something I just dreamed up. It’s a tool called Cantril’s ladder (after a psychologist who pioneered opinion polling). Researchers and pollsters have been using it to measure people’s expectations worldwide for more than forty-five years. No matter where you start, and no matter how far off your best possible life seems, if you expect to be on a higher rung five years from now, you share the first core belief of the hopeful: “The future will be better than the present.”
When I asked my best friend these questions, she found her best possible life in her own past. “I would like to be surrounded by lots of people, like I was back at college. And, I would like to be using my brain more like back then. That is what I want my future to look like.” She gave her current self a 7 and then backed up to a 6.5. When I asked her about her life five years from now, she smiled, looked up at the ceiling and said, “A nine. I would like to be at a nine.” She covered many years in a brief exchange. And a preview of her future self gave her a twinkle in her eye.
An athletic six feet, six inches, Andrew DeVries had spent most of his fifty-five years chasing a ball of one kind or another. So friends and family were not surprised when Andy tried out for the Michigan Senior Olympics volleyball team and made a good showing. Unfortunately, just weeks after the Olympic trials, in September 2002, Andy was riding his motorcycle on a Grand Rapids street when a car struck him. He would not step back on the court for nearly a year.
The accident crushed part of Andy’s left leg. After several surgeries to try to repair the damage, doctors told him that they would have to amputate the leg at mid-thigh. They drew a black line with a Sharpie to show him where the cut would go. That’s when a physician’s assistant named Sarah Scholl reminded Andy how to futurecast.
Andy recalls, “As everybody was making plans for my life without a leg, a young hospitalist came up to me and said, ‘Andy, what kind of golf ball do you play?’ ” Scholl’s question brought Andy up short. Under the circumstances, he said, “talking about golf balls seemed almost idiotic.” But he told her he liked the Titleist Pro V1, and the next morning, there, in the midst of all the cards and flowers in his room, was a twelve-pack of Titleist Pro V1 balls.
“She helped me stop thinking about how sorry I should feel for myself,” Andy says. “And she brought a glimmer of hope.” Scholl reminded him that he still had a future to think about.
When Andy woke up in recovery, he still had ten toes. The surgeons had discovered a little bit of blood flow and decided not to take the leg after all.
Sarah and Andy became very close during the rest of his hospital stay and, on the day he was released to a rehab facility, Sarah arranged to be the one wheeling him out to the ambulance. She also had a favor to ask him. She’d lost her father while she was still in high school and, when the time came for her to get married, she wanted Andy to be the one to walk her down the aisle and give her away.
Sarah had a gift for shaking up Andy’s world. Here he was, going into another hospital knowing he might never get out of a wheelchair and Sarah didn’t even have a boyfriend. When he pointed that out, she replied, “Someday I will.” They promised to stay in touch.
Sarah wasn’t the only one making plans for Andy’s future. While he was still at the rehabilitation hospital, he got a phone call from John Wilder, the Senior Olympics volleyball coach. John had some good news. “Congratulations, Andy, you made the team!” Andy tried to explain the realities: the accident, the surgeries, the rehab. Coach Wilder persisted. He told Andy that he had earned the spot, and it was his, on one condition. “You get better. I’ll play you if you can just stand up.” The coach’s promise touched Andy. “His words ignited a spark. I went at rehabilitation with a vengeance. Seven months later I was able to show up for the Senior Olympics. Although I could barely stand, John kept his word: he put me in the game. I collected myself enough to serve. We won that game and the next. As the competition intensified, the coach had to take me out, but our team went on to win the gold medal.”
Like Sarah, Coach Wilder helped Andy travel through time to his future, imagining himself on the court during the Olympics. All he had to do was stand up.
Andy’s story doesn’t end with that team gold medal. Over the next few years, he faced several life-threatening setbacks and surgeries that would have sidelined many people permanently—including an injury caused by pushing too hard in rehab. Andy got smarter about getting stronger; he learned that slow and steady paid off. He began to look into the future again. “For the first time in five years, I subscribed to a magazine in my own name.” He also began to craft a new second act for himself, becoming a fund-raiser for his beloved alma mater, Calvin College.
Then, in the summer of 2009, seven years after his accident, Andy got an email from Sarah Scholl, who had moved to Oregon. “I have a boyfriend—will you come?” Andy did not think twice. Sarah picked
Andy up at the Portland airport before the wedding. When she saw him strolling toward her, she burst into tears. It was the first time she’d ever seen him standing upright. And for Andy, “What a joy it was walking—not wheelchairing, but walking—Sarah down the aisle.”
Most of us are like Andy. If we have a vision and plan for the future, we can’t help but be pulled forward by life, even when our present betrays us. We start to create a narrative about a future self that competes with the old stories about ourselves. As we fill in more details and take small steps in our future direction, our energy is freed up. When we’re excited about “what’s next,” we invest more in our daily life, and we can see beyond current challenges. That’s the big point behind all the goal-setting strategies I’ll discuss in this chapter.
Expecting a Better Future Is Universal
To find out if the tendency to expect a positive future is universal,
two psychology colleagues and I analyzed answers to the “best possible life” question gathered from the 2008 Gallup World Poll, a representative sample of people in 142 countries. Across all countries, people said they expected to be on about the seventh rung of the life ladder in five years. The vast majority (84 percent) expected their future life to be at the midpoint of the scale (5) or above. Eighty-nine percent of people polled worldwide expected their life in five years to be as good as or better than their current life.
The people who had the most positive expectations lived in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United States. The most pessimistic people worldwide lived in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Bulgaria, Haiti, and Lebanon. But only one country (Zimbabwe, homeland of Tererai Trent, who had envisioned going to America for her education and Ph.D.) had negative expectations overall (a mean response of lower than 5).
We don’t have an optimism problem in the world. As the
“optimism bias” predicts (see
chapter 3
), we are automatically inclined to look toward the positive, which makes us somewhat immune to many of the events and circumstances that could dim our views. Unfortunately, we do have a hope problem. Only half the people in the world can vigorously pursue goals that matter, keeping up their energy and finding pathway after pathway in the face of obstacles.