Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption” shared a line about hope in a note to his friend Red – “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
It is a beautiful note about Hope. Hope, after all, is an incredibly uplifting and powerful force. It can help see us through the darkest of times and get us to believe when our backs are against the wall.
For all the wonderful things hope is, there is one thing it is not. A strategy.
I caught myself making this mistake recently. It may have been a result of tiredness or naivete or a combination of both. But, I hoped that things would work out a certain way.
It didn’t.
I was disappointed.
That disappointment was a waste of time, energy, and emotion.
A better approach would have been to have multiple contingency plans and act with the assumption that things would go wrong.
Because they do.
Hope is not a strategy.
