The Primacy of Hope
Posted on January 19, 2012 by Blake Leath
This past week, as I've spoken with several professional salespeople, I've been ruminating on the importance of hope. Again. It seems that I'm always coming back to it...
You know about hope, right? (It's much more than simply the birthplace of Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee.)
Hope is the meme that undergirded the entire 2008 Obama presidential campaign, best captured when artist Shepard Fairey rendered that iconic, colorful poster.
Hope is the thing which animates, in large part, logotherapy as created, defined and lived by the inimitable Viktor Frankl.
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(I know what he meant when he wrote it) but hope is also the thing that Benjamin Ola Akande (economist, scholar and Dean of the Business School at Webster University in St. Louis) declared, "Is not a strategy."
(I know what he meant when he wrote it) but it is also the thing that salesman Rick Page wrote an entire book about under the title Hope is Not a Strategy.
And yet today—and every day—to those who say, "Hope is not a strategy," I say poppycock. Balderdash. Baloney. Hogwash. Hooey. Malarkey.
Hope is THEE strategy.
Hope is THEE magnet that draws each and every one of us upward and forward day after revolving day.
Hope is THEE spark that ignites our fuels and energies, our passions, our meaning.
Hope is a common denominator in virtually every pure denomination, every thriving culture, and any thriving relationship.
There is more to life than "hope," to be sure.
But in the words of Andy Dufresne (as written by Stephen King in the classic 1994 film adaptation of Shawshank Redemption), "Remember, Red—hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
Hope, unquestionably, is a formidable meme—a living, breathing, organic, transmitted, viral idea that infects and inoculates humankind.
Martin Seligman proved it (again) in his definitive masterpiece, Learned Optimism, when he documented that the single, most determinant attribute of successful salespeople is not experience, not competence, not discipline, not people skills, not technical prowess, not mastery of the features and benefits but is, instead, flat-out and simply: optimism.
"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Hope = Optimism.
So make your calls and fill your pipeline, but remember this: preceding and succeeding any great pyramid, project, process or plan is the utter hope of it. The dream of it all.