Is hope inherently dangerous or is it helpful? Well,we could start by looking at the definition. Hope means to cherish a desire with anticipation. I’m not sure that is entirely accurate, though. Hope is more of a wanting of something that you have no or little control over, such as “I hope the war comes to an end,” or “I sure hope I get that promotion.” It places the outcome on external events and not in your control, so is it empowering or disempwering? To hope for something is to divert control away from yourself and to place it on something that is not you. I find hope to be incredibly naive and childish, but it is helpful to those who truly believe they have no control and have to rely on all these external things going right to have what they hope for come true.
You can spend your time hoping or you can spend your time creating. When you are creating the life you want, hope is not a part of it. You are taking the steps to create what it is you want. You aren’t sitting around, waiting for things to snap into place. Even if your attempts are not perfect, you can calibrate them later. The most important step here is action, not hoping something will just happen for you. Hope is almost like a wish. “I wish I won the lottery.” Hope is a fleeting emotion, always in the back of our minds, but never fully present. It is always fixated on the future, and what may happen. It is a fantasy for the most part, simply because it hasn’t happened yet. You are far better off with certainty than hope. Certainty is king when it comes to actually getting what it is you want.
On the other end of the spectrum is hopelessness. Is that better or worse than hope? I would say that hopelessness can either be truly realistic or completely false based on your experiences. If you are living in a third world country and live on less than $1 a day, it makes perfect sense to be hopeless when it comes to your future life, because what are the odds you will instantly become a millionaire or start your own business? Very low. But if you are given tons of opportunities every day to excel and succeed, why would you ever be hopeless? Sure, the world may be going to hell, but that doesn’t mean you have to as well. You can still live your life with purpose and find plenty of meaning in life. There is no law that says you can’t. You can have a little hope, but no more, no less. A little hope is slightly better than having too much or no hope at all.
But having a little hope has to be rooted in reality. You have to actually believe what it is you are hoping for. You have to be on the right track towards who it is you hope to become. None of this sitting around, hoping something will just happen for you. You need to be an active participant in your life in order to actually attain what it is you are wanting. What bothers me is that most people choose to remain stuck in Fantasyland. They are not actively pursuing what it is they want, so how in the world could they still expect it to come to them? You have to put in the work and be committed, otherwise the universe will conclude you don’t really want what it is you say you want.
Like I’ve said before, you are the author of your own life. Nobody else is going to solve all your problems for you, attain all your goals. Hope may serve as a motivator, but don’t use it as a goal-achieving mechanism on its own. Just hoping some situation will get better on its own is pure delusion. You have to, at some point, put in the work to make things the way you want them to be. You are simply a creative being that was placed here on Earth to create whatever it is you desire to the extent of your beliefs and the world around you. You are capable of doing great things, doing bad things, or doing nothing. It is all your choice. Every action we take is a choice. Every inaction we take is a choice.
I’m not slamming hope here, just putting it in its proper context. When you are truly on the right track towards your goals, you don’t need to hope for them to happen, you realize that the achievement is an inevitability. You know deep down in your heart that you will achieve whatever it is you set out to do because you have actually put in the work to achieve your goal, not just sat around visualizing what it would be like. You may have done that in the beginning, but you knew that action was required. For those of you who think visualizing a million dollars in your bank account is going to make you an instant millionaire, I have news for you, stop sitting around and find a way to make that money actually get there. Otherwise, the only way you’ll have that much in your account is through a bank error. Which means it won’t be there for long. If you truly want to lose 40 lbs., do you really think it is going to happen overnight because you imagined yourself at your ideal weight? Or you hoped it would just melt off in the shower?
Instead of the word hope, let’s replace it with want. If you want something to happen, you make it happen. You intend for it to happen. You take the necessary steps for it to happen. You don’t sit around and hope it will happen because you’ll be waiting forever if you don’t actually do something about it. Even if the problem is large, like world hunger, you can take steps to better the situation and keep moving up the ladder. Even if you don’t solve the whole problem of starving people, you will have fed thousands, maybe even millions by the time you leave this Earth. That will be a gigantic net positive effect on the Earth. It won’t come from hoping the problem is solved, it will be from you taking direct action towards creating what you want.
This may take some time, possibly even your entire lifetime, to work hard at your goals in pursuit of achieving them, but think about how you will feel about your life at the end vs. how you would feel if you spent your whole life hoping these things would happen for you. Even if you fail at every goal you try to achieve, at least you gave it your best shot instead of wondering what could have been. You learned much more about yourself than you could ever from visualizations and journaling. You actually went out into the world and lived. You’ve lived a life they make movies about, not a life where you’re simply an extra. Become what it is you truly know you can be. Don’t just imagine who it is you want to be, get up and make it happen. And even if you don’t fully succeed, you will still find the experience far more rewarding than doing nothing. Believe me, we are nothing without our experiences.
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