HOPE
& “THE QUESTION”
Hope is the Superman
of emotions. It’s more powerful than a locomotive and when you properly harness
hope, you can leap tall buildings with a single bound.
I’m in the hope business. I help people turn hope into
reality. And many of you are in the hope business too, especially with your
children. Let me tell you how being in the hope business works.
In the book, “Yesterday And Today For Tomorrow,” by
Napoleon Hill and Judith Williamson, 2011, it is said that “Hope is invisible and
it can slip right through our fingers as if it were quicksilver. We cannot see,
hear, touch, taste or smell hope. Yet we know when it’s there. If we seek out
hope it can be as elusive as a leprechaun. Yet without it, our lives lose the
capacity to endure. Where does hope come from and where does it go? These are
important questions to answer, for without hope, our life can spiral down and
even end prematurely.
“Hope comes from the optimistic belief that the best
outcome will occur regardless of the circumstances. Hope is the lighthouse of
the soul that keeps the beacon lit and pointed in our direction. It uplifts us
and gives us momentum for the future. Hope enriches our lives and is one of the
main ingredients for a positive mental attitude. It promotes thankfulness by
causing us to recognize our daily blessings. And, hope inspires us to keep on
keeping on because by hoping we know that the perfect end result is right
around the corner. Hope is a spiritual elixir or tonic that creates a
predisposition for the development of good habits. It is a “yes” rather than a
“no.”
“Hope leaves us when we permit pessimistic thoughts to
invade our mental space and take up permanent residence. Negativity spreads
quickly and forces hope out. By choosing to be depressed rather than uplifted,
hope vacates the poisonous environment. By choosing to be depressed…yes there
is a lot of choosing going on when it comes to our feeling and emotional states.
Like leaves caught up in a whirlwind, hope can become entangled in the mental
storm and whisked away. Hope leaves when the environment does not support its
presence. Hope is evicted and soon fear becomes the new resident.
“Our power to choose creates our outcome. By staying on
the positive side of the street not only do we enlighten ourselves but spread
light to others. Modeling hopefulness creates the atmosphere for miracles to
occur. When hope is present, people recognize that the possibility can exist
for a better end result. Why not cultivate hope? You have far less to lose than
if you pursued the other option.”
Napoleon Hill was a brilliant man.
Emily Dickenson wrote this about
hope. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings a
song, without words, and never stops at all.”
So yes indeed, hope is a powerful force. We need hope. We hope for
happiness and success.
Let’s define those terms.
Success is a favorable outcome, the obtainment of wealth,
position, or honor. Happiness is the combination of momentary joy and lasting
contentment. Momentary joy is the easy part. Lasting contentment is the hard
part.
By nature, humans are happiness seekers. Little
children’s main daytime activity is called play. If a child does not enjoy what
he is doing, he stops and does something else, because he seeks pleasure. When
we become adults, our main daytime activity is called work. We seek happiness and
success at work.
Human behavior is an amazing and mysterious thing. It is
by applying behavior that we hope to find happiness and success. As we all
know, some people find these things and some people don’t. Assuming we all
leave the starting gate with about the same potential, and assuming no severe
negative mitigating factors are present, how do we account for the difference? How
is it that some are motivated and some are not? How is it some win and some
don’t? How is it that some are just better at life than others?
I’ve been interested in human behavior all my life,
especially high achievement and in perseverance in the search for success and
happiness. This interest might be genetic or because I was born into a family
of high achievers. In my family, there were two school teachers, a university
professor, a nurse, a New York opera company costume designer, a six-term
superior court judge and adviser the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a dentist, a mechanical engineer, two inventors who became
millionaires, and seven physicians, including my great aunt and my grandmother.
Not too many people can say that their grandmother was a physician, but I can. I
can also say that a cousin of mine is a heart transplant surgeon.
Now let me tell you about my father, and the giant of a
man he was, so you can perhaps understand the depth of my predicament, and how
small and insignificant I often felt when sitting across from him at the
evening dinner table.
My father finished four years of high school in three,
then four years of college in three, then went to medical school where he was
president of the graduating class. Dad had two medical specialties, not one,
but two, one in psychiatry and one in neurology. He practiced medicine in three
states simultaneously, had an airplane. He employed a covey of clinical
psychologists, social workers, nurses, and electroencephalography technicians. He
ran two electroencephalographic clinics, two. In our town in Indiana, he kept
both hospital psychiatric wards full, personally saw 25 to 30 patients a day,
and often worked seven days a week. He was active in community affairs, was an
artist, a musician, and even a Rotarian. At one time he owned eight cars. And I
had dinner with him every night. So I grew up wondering two things: HOW did my dad
do all that he did? And, WHY did he do all that he did. What drove him? Why all
the dedication?
A little story goes right in here.
Over 100 years ago, in 1908, an unknown young man stood
in the foyer of a wealthy and famous old man’s 64-room, Fifth Avenue mansion in
New York City, waiting for the butler to escort him to the library where the
two men were to meet. This wealthy man, who was 73 years old the day of this
meeting, had immigrated to America with his parents from Scotland. The family
settled in a poor area of Pennsylvania. The first job he had, when he was 13 years old, was as a
bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill, where he worked twelve
hours a day, six days a week. His wages were $1.25 per week, per week. But, he
progressed. He had a ravenous appetite for knowledge, read everything he could
get his hands on, and in time, he got better jobs. He quickly progressed up the
ladder of success, much farther than anyone could have imagined, all the way to
unprecedented fame and fortune. What drove him to do so much?
The young man was 25 at the time of
the meeting. He was also born into poverty, in one-room cabin in Virginia. His parents
gave him an unusual first name. They named him Napoleon. His last name was Hill.
And the old man was Andrew Carnegie, the founder of US Steel.
Napoleon Hill had been hired by
a magazine to write a profile on Andrew Carnegie, and he had been granted three hours in which to conduct
an interview. However, by the end of the allotted time, the 73 year old
Carnegie had become so taken with the intelligence of this intense 25 year old
young man, that he kept extending their meeting…until it had stretched into a
three-day marathon.
Hill later wrote that his first question to Mr. Carnegie
was this. “In as few words as possible, to what do you owe your fortune?” Carnegie
said, “My fortune is due entirely to the work of my Mastermind Group.” Hill
wrote that down, and then asked, “What’s a Mastermind Group?” Carnegie
explained, “My Mastermind Group is 50 experienced business people who give me
input and business advice, and, who hold me accountable to taking their input
and doing all the good things what I say I want to do. Why do I need advice? Simple,
I do not know everything. To be successful, I need to see what I cannot see. I
need to learn what I do not know, so I can make decisions that build wealth and
make me happy. Without the input from my Mastermind group, I would-be-nothing.”
Hill wrote that down too, and it changed his life, and the lives of millions.
At the conclusion of their meeting,
Carnegie enlisted Hill to interview many of the successful people of his time,
to uncover and write about how they became so successful. Hill interviewed
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Charles
Schwab, F. W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., George Eastman, John Wanamaker, William
Jennings Bryan, three US Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft,
Woodrow Wilson, The Premier of Russia: Joseph Stalin, 500 men in all. The
project lasted over twenty years, during which time Hill became a personal
advisor to Carnegie as well as to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
All his years of study culminated in a book entitled Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937. It’s one of the bestselling
business success books of all time.
Hill describes The MASTERMIND PRINCIPLE: “Economic advantage can be created by anyone, anyone, willing
to surround himself or herself with the advice, counsel, and personal decision-making
cooperation of a group of individuals, who are willing to lend wholehearted aid,
in a spirit of harmony.” In other words, no one gets rich alone. Unrelenting
stress and frustration is the unforeseen cost of going it alone in life.
Now back to my father.
My father had a Mastermind Group too. There was a monthly
Borough Family Board of Directors meeting that my father and his two brothers,
the dentist and the mechanical engineer, had at a little delicatessen in South
Bend, Indiana where we lived. On occasion I was invited to attend this gathering.
In their meetings, the Borough Boys would review what each brother had done
since last meeting, and discuss what they intended to get done or well started
between that meeting and the next one. It was there that I began to understand HOW
people could achieve so much, as I observed that my father and his two brothers
figured out the HOW together. They
were using the Mastermind Principle.
But, the WHY eluded me until I recalled something that my
father and his two brothers did with ME all the time. They were always asking a
particular question, a life-generating question. Not with the same words all
the time, but the crux of the question was ever-present in my life. THE
QUESTION was WHAT DO YOU WANT.
Aimed at one’s self THE WHAT DO YOU WANT QUESTION has
subsets. What am I willing to do to get what I want? What’s the plan? Who can
help me? What must I do more of, less of, or start doing, or stop doing?
When we properly answer THE WHAT DO “I” WANT QUESTION, we
create a Future Based Self. This is a snap shot of who we want to be at some
time in the future…and it’s very motivating.
ALL my family members asked THE QUESTION of themselves
and each other. And, of course, anyone can do this. And, answering THE QUESTION
in the proper way, gives us the WHY we do things and, at the same time, it compels
us to figure out the HOW.
The proper way for you to answer THE QUESTION is on paper,
and in the present of others who care about you, and who will encourage you to
develop a good answer. The others can be family members, business associates,
partners, co-workers, and employees. That’s what my father and his brothers did.
It’s what Edison and Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie did. The answer to THE
QUESTION allows us to envision new possibilities then lean forward in time, and
step right on into those opportunities.
In truth, most people spend more time thinking of how they’ll
spend their Fourth of July weekend than figuring out what they want. When that
holiday is looming, they take out a piece of paper, get their ideas together,
start writing them down, they talk to family members, get input from all
concerned, solicit support, get agreement, allocate resources, then they
proceed with their plans and have a great 4th. Seems to me that we ought to do
the same with what we want for our lives too, don’t you think? For a full life,
a life of happiness and success we need an answer to THE QUESTION.
You can ask this question of yourself on a grand scale. What
do I want for my life? What do I want for my business or career? You can also
ask yourself this question on a small scale. What do I want today? What’s my top priority today, this morning? Get this one answered and
you’ll focused and dialed in on the three to four hours until lunch. This
prioritizing helps you block out distractions and get things done.
Your answer to THE QUESTION will help you find your
passion. And isn’t finding and living your passion important?
Now, here’s the real secret of life. No one is going to
give you much - opportunity perhaps, encouragement sure, you may be equipped
with knowledge and skills, people may point you in a direction, help you find your
passion then cheer you on - but for the most part, you’ll have to go get what
you want. You’ll have to take life. Now you can take a lot, IF you are willing
to do things that sometimes may make you uncomfortable, and IF you will do enough
of what’s known to work. We know what those things known to work are. To my
mind, the first and most important of those things is to properly answer THE
QUESTION “WHAT DO I WANT?” Start with the end in mind. Then it’s all behavior.
I wrote a book about my work with business owner clients,
and what I’ve learned from them over the years. I may write more books. If I do,
one will be about THE QUESTION.
People say “We ARE what we do.” I think that’s backwards.
I say “We DO what we are.” If were seriously engaged in life, we can’t help but
DO what we are.
I remain fascinated with the psychology of achievement. I
love coaching people in their pursuit of all they seek. And, I know about hope,
and how we need hope. But, hope alone is not a strategy for life. You also need
to ask and answer the WHAT DO I WANT QUESTION. When you get that clear nothing
will stop you.
