We recently differentiated faith vs. opportunity and discussed how faith is not a reliable source for decision making. Today, we are going to try to understand why hope is not a good strategy either. If faith is not a reliable source, then hope certainly isn’t a good way to strategize your life or business. Many people hope for great things to happen to them but certainly do not take a moment to actually reflect on why things haven’t happened so far.
Hope is a significant form of failure as you transfer the ownership of your life to someone else and are saying that you are incapable of handling the situation ahead and hope for an alternate outcome you do not know how to handle. You are indirectly saying that despite the fact that you will take no action, you are still in search of a reaction, and a favorable one at that.
Actions create reactions and despite some people linking faith, religion, or hope to their results, it was ultimately nothing more than their actions that led to reactions. You simply cannot win the lottery without playing, and cannot make money without working or investing, and more importantly you cannot hope for customers to walk in your business or visit your site; you have to market your business so they may come. You can only take on actions that you feel benefit your outcomes and allow time, not hope, to do its job.
In this particular segment, I am not questioning your beliefs, but rather taking more actions over hoping it could benefit your outcome. There is nothing wrong with thinking positive and having hope as long as, we as individuals, have done all in our power to affect our outcomes. Think about all those times when you gave up instead of fighting until the very end and ask yourself if just a little more could have made a difference. Every time you want to give up your actions in exchange of hope, remind yourself of why you didn’t do it right from the start and fight for what you believed.
You could very well sit around all day and hope for things to get better but reality is that you start with energy, and only when it runs out do you look for hope to substitute the hard work in itself. When in reality all you need to succeed is only one more boost of that same energy that got you initially began with.
Make every move count, stay positive until the very end while having hope. Just don’t let hope become your escape from reality.
“Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” – Unknown
