Hope Is Not A Strategy (Part One)

It began with a blog post, which led me to Joan of Arc, then twitter, and finally another blog post that led me here.

Lest you think it’s circuitous thinking, give me the next couple of days to bring it into focus for you.

When my uber-helpful coach, Sarah Robinson posed the question “What is Generosity?“, she made the comment that too many people today are touting being generous as some kind of strategy.

I hit reply, almost without thinking and out came this:

IMHO, generosity can’t be a strategy, else it’s not true generosity – or maybe I’m confusing it with altruism. By definition, “Generosity is the habit of giving freely without expecting anything in return.” Any expectation negates the nature of generosity. Generosity is unconditional love in action. It’s not possible if it’s a strategy. Again, “strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.” A particular goal connotes an expected outcome. You can’t have expectation and no expectation in the same gesture.

You CAN have hope. For example, I’m doing this because I want to, and I HOPE that if you like it, you’ll tell people about it. No pressure, no expectation you’ll actually do anything other than receive the gift.

Hope is not a strategy either – at least from what people tell me, but I do a LOT of hoping, backed by action, and it seems to be working for me.

I also cracked that I should probably write a blog post about this, but didn’t feel I had the information to fully flesh out something of value to you.

A day or so later, while clearing off my in-box, I found a story card about Joan of Arc:

“Although she was not educated, Joan was very spiritual, and spent many hours in prayer and in helping others. When she was 13, she began to hear “voices” that carried messages from God. By the time she was 17, she was certain God wanted her to aid King Charles VII of France in his fight against the English.  She successfully predicted the defeat in Orleans and was able to pick out the king, who was in disguise.”

Eventually, she was placed on trial, condemned to death as a heretic and burned at the stake.

Later that night, I popped onto twitter, and saw the tail end of a conversation between Sarah, and two of my pals, which triggered this thought in my brain:

Children are “distracted” from the world by their dreams. Adults are distracted from their dreams by the world.

I thought it was kind of poignant, but it felt like one of those timely things to say on twitter that will get retweeted a little and then die. Still, not really thinking much of it, I tweeted it and went to sleep.

Joan of Arc, dreams, visions, faith, hope, kids, all this stuff was swirling in my brain. Somehow it felt like I had been here before, staring at a puzzle with tow pieces still in my hands, not sure how they went together. They were all connected, but I wasn’t sure how.

Ever feel like that?

And then, Les McKeown, smarty pants that he is, made this post that made everything gel. In particular, it was this part of the post that pulled it all together:

“Many child prodigies in various disciplines – notably art, chess and mathematics – appear to be born with a highly attenuated ability to discern intricate patterns.”

Now, I’m not one to call myself a child prodigy. Perhaps that’s because I was fortunate enough to be part of a school program for academically talented/gifted kids from first grade through high school. A program, which sadly no longer exists in my community. I was in a room full of smarty pants kids that excelled in math, music, science, writing, art, etc.

I was not the smartest kid in ANY class, but I was “well rounded”, I guess you could say. I was in the top ten percent in most of my classes.  I knew enough to “get by” in every subject, which in that group was getting an A/B average. Seriously, if you got less than a B+, you were usually looked at like an idiot. We all came to respect each other though, because invariably, where one of us was weak, there were others who were strong. And because we were all so socially awkward (think Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”), we only had each other for the most part.

That’s another lesson for another day.

The point of even dredging up my school days was that the one thing I was better at than anyone else was finding patterns, common threads and other “connections” between seemingly unrelated stuff. I scored exceptionally high on pattern recognition tests, from alpha numeric to shape identification, even when I was young. I could even point out errors in the tests that the administrators didn’t catch.

And since that time, I’ve come to learn that these patterns, connections and correlations exist in nearly every facet of our lives.

We all know that “dumb jock” who ended up being a nobody. Or the cheerleader that got pregnant before graduation. Or the nerd who went on to greatness and was voted “most likely to succeed”. These stereotypes exists because they are patterns.

They are cycles that we can see coming – sometimes from miles away. Like the girl who was rejected from her high school drama club and later went on to be a successful actress. Or the awkward basketball player who went on to become one of the greatest players of all time – after he was rejected by a coach when he was in school.

There is very little in the world that isn’t cyclical in nature. I maintain that if we can’t see the pattern, it’s probably because we just haven’t experienced a long enough cycle to see the full pattern yet.

Think about your favorite stories. What elements of those stories mirror your own life? What elements of those stories are repeated over and over in your life? We can hope it’s the happy endings, but for most of us, we’re caught in the drama of the story.

Hope is not a strategy. Neither for your business nor your life. It’s not a way to get things done – to walk around with our fingers crossed, thinking good thoughts, and offering up wishful “prayers” that our story will have a happy ending.

No you’ve got to DO something. Doing is the strategy.

Many moons ago, I made a conscious decision to ask for what I want. Mom used to say that “the answer is always no if you don’t ask.”

Funny thing about moms, they’re often more right than you care to admit – especially when you’re a kid.

So I started asking. And people started saying yes. Some people say no, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of folks say yes.

I devised a strategy: Ask, with hope.

Ask for that thing, and in doing so, you’re taking action. Take action, and be hopeful about the outcome. Hope, backed by action – or perhaps, action, backed by hope – is a powerful strategy in the world.

It builds businesses. It restores lost friendships, it heals old wounds. It improves lives. It creates new experiences.

It works.

What have you been needing to ask for? Stop asking yourself why you’re not asking for it. ASK for it. Go for it.

Ask, with hope, and watch what happens.