Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (27 page)

Parents, teachers, and principals tend to know the communities around their school better than do people without children and many city officials. Given their direct responsibility for the safety, welfare, and development of children, they have a special vigilance for what makes a kid’s life better or worse. By conducting community audits, they can locate and resolve problems that sap students’ energy and create conditions that promote student effort. Whether they are setting up a Walking School Bus program or enlisting neighbors to sit on the front stoop when kids are going to or from school, educators and other adults can help create communities that make learning easier and bright futures more likely.

There is a real disconnect between what kids need to do tomorrow and what we teach them in school today. There is a troubling gap between how confident our kids act and how competent they are. And there is
a hole where the community support for our young people should be. Despite the vast majority of U.S. children who have hopeful, caring adults in their lives, our Gallup Student Poll suggest that a few million almost certainly don’t.

To make hope happen today, conduct a small-scale community audit on your next neighborhood walk or drive to the local store. Find one thing that might be getting in the way of a child’s success, health, or happiness. Then use your hope to make that obstacle go away.

C
HARITY
E
SCOBAR,
a hardworking teacher, is dedicated to helping her adult students—among them an elderly man, a maid, a carpenter, and an ex-convict—learn how to read. She remains committed to her work, though wooed by Arturo, a wealthy man with an amnesic wife, who loves her and wants to take her away from toil and poverty. Daily, she charms, cajoles, and tutors her students, celebrating the small steps toward literacy. At first they read only small words, then short sentences, and finally entire paragraphs. Slowly, her students, overcoming many obstacles, transform their lives by learning to read. And they battle numerous villainous people who try to thwart their growth.

Sound like a soap opera? It is. Well, it was—but with a twist.
Ven Conmigo
(
Come With Me
) was developed by Miguel Sabido, once a producer for one of Mexico’s largest commercial television networks, specifically to promote enrollment in adult literacy classes offered by the national government.
Airing for thirty minutes a day, five times a week, it ran for 280 episodes in the mid-1970s, drawing larger audiences
than the network’s regular telenovelas. Each episode ended with a thirty-second epilogue from a noted Mexican celebrity who emphasized the primary point it made and encouraged viewers to apply the lesson in their own lives. One episode-epilogue combo was supposedly so provocative that it created a traffic jam in Mexico City as thousands of people rushed to pick up a pamphlet about a national literacy program at a government office.
Ven Conmigo
was credited with increasing participation in literacy courses by 63 percent, to more than eight hundred thousand students.

The show was based on a sophisticated methodology for using dramatic media to promote social change.
Sabido wove his approach together by analyzing the success of a Peruvian soap opera called
Simplemente María
(
Simply Maria
), believed to be first telenovela aimed at increasing literacy.
He also drew on the work of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, whose pioneering studies showed how social influences could increase personal motivation.

These soap operas for good, many of which continue to be aired on television and radio today, turned entertainment media into an educational tool for grown-ups, modeling positive behavior and lifestyles that directed the viewer toward self-improvement and the common good. The soap opera stars who typically have the most impact on viewers, in Sabido’s design, are the transitional characters. These characters are the ones who seem most like us. They are in a battle between their old selves and their new ones and demonstrate that hope can change us. These transitional characters help viewers learn to move from a life defined by bad behaviors, daily struggles, and physical or psychological impoverishment through a process of difficult change to a life filled with what matters most.

You can make hope contagious for your friends, workplaces, schools, and communities by building a network of hope through three tactics:

Model hope through stories and deeds.

Provide hope through instrumental or intrusive support.

Become a Super Empowered, Hopeful Individual.

The tagline for this chapter could be “Hope . . . pass it on!” because hope
is
contagious.
As explained by network scientists Nicholas Christakis and Stephen Fowler in their book
Connected,
your friend’s friend’s friend can influence your hope and happiness. (They call this the “Three Degrees of Influence Rule.”) Christakis and Fowler examined the social networks of thousands of people who had participated in a longitudinal study of health. After reviewing decades’ worth of medical and psychological data, they discovered that “contagions” and “emotional stampedes” run through our social circles—shaping everything from how much we weigh and how much we smoke or drink, to our voting patterns, daily feelings, and goals for the future.

These three degrees of influence and these emotional stampedes need not be left entirely to chance. You can surround yourself with hopeful people. Your friend’s hope has the greatest impact on you, but your hope is also affected by your friend’s friend’s relationship with the future. Your hope is actually dependent on your entire social network, including best friends, role models, and secondhand associates. And your hope can be shared with others. While it might be hard to believe, your hope, in a small but meaningful way, is related to the hope of someone you may never meet.

Hope models are all around us. The runner who just passed my window suggests to me, “Hey, I should go for a run.” The lunch mate who chooses salad over a burger subtly reminds me to eat healthy. The boss who devotes an hour a week to quietly and sincerely rewarding and recognizing employees encourages me to praise the people in my office. As
I discussed in
chapter 11
, our behavior is primed, often unconsciously, by the actions of others in our social network.

Our subconscious brains are more purposeful and intentional than we once thought. They scan the people, places, and things around us to answer a question that nags us day in and day out: “What do I do next?” We are primed to set and move toward goals by everyday sights and experiences. So when positive role models pop up at the right place and time, they help us answer that “next” question in a way that nudges us toward goals that matter. The priming is not wholly left to chance when we surround ourselves with people who model desirable behavior.

Hopeful people have a habit of showing up when others need them. They seem primed to pick up the feelings of someone who could use help knocking down an obstacle or filling a gap. I have seen school custodians, parents, teachers, and local businesspeople modeling hope to children all in the same day, with each seemingly stepping in when a child could use a little guidance. I have watched CEOs, managers, and rank-and-file employees crowd around new employees and interns, vying for the chance to help them learn the business and, as a by-product, showing them how to pave the way for the next batch of new recruits.

To learn more about how people come to model hope, I started asking them how hope was taught to them. Yano Jones, the most hopeful youth mentor I have met, told me the story of his hope model.

As a young man growing up in the streets of North Omaha, I was told I was a statistic and that I wouldn’t go to college. I was also told that I wasn’t smart enough to handle college. At one point I began to think like that, until a person who believed in me stepped into my life and inspired me. This person saw the potential in me and worked hard to make me understand that I can do whatever it is I want to do in life. I was told that it wouldn’t be easy. I was told that you will deal with adversity and you will make mistakes.

Yano met his mentor, Dick Davis, while working a summer job. As a boy in Nebraska, Yano had never known an African-American man who had founded a company and earned public respect for his business acumen.

One day I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Davis and talk about how he came to own the Davis Companies, where I worked summers in college. Dr. Davis warned me of the harsh realities that I might face as I begin to look for jobs upon graduation.

He explained to me that every day in life for him is the opportunity to prove people wrong. To show people that he can and has worked just as hard as the next man. He made sense to me. It’s as if he had experienced a lot of the things I had seen and faced the obstacles I had faced.

So what I started to do is watch every move he made, not really saying much, but just observing how he handled himself around people, how he dressed, what his communication was like. He taught me what to do and what not to do. He helped me understand the importance of networking and treating everyone around me with respect and high regard. He left me with a lot of things that helped me to be the man I am today—understanding the importance of hard work, dedication and commitment. He helped me to realize that even if you make a mistake, figure out what you did wrong and learn from that situation.

Classic epics like Homer’s
Odyssey
are the model for “the hero’s journey” that has taught life lessons to numberless generations. Today, we can find many modern heroes who look a lot more like us. And just as Yano learned from Dick Davis, their stories about how to move toward a perceived destiny still captivate listeners, inviting us—subconsciously or consciously, implicitly or explicitly—to join them on their journey.

Reading between the lines of stories about rugged individualism, self-reliance, up-by-the-bootstraps success, you’ll usually discover a supporting cast of caring people who provided crucial help in the form of money, time, and other assistance.
Social scientists call this instrumental support. Most folks, like Seth Reams, just call it helping your neighbor.