Is Hope a Killer of Productivity?
I often marinated this thought in my mind, but never fully developed it into a concept: are constantly hopeful and positive people, sort of those self-cheerleader types, really just - lazy?
Let’s make something clear: I dig hope. The kind of hope where you break your leg and hope to heal fast or hope the world will be a decent place sometime soon - that is a good general hope every decent human being should have. But the people who think that hoping is enough, people who don’t work on anything because they think hope will get them there - is it laziness?
Social media is full of platitudes, such as: “Go hunny, you will make it, you will kill it, just hope, you are awesome, you deserve it, you got it, just HOPE!!!”
Just hope?
If you actually got up and made a certain effort to get there, you wouldn’t need to rely on hope. I read something interesting the other day -
"I believed that hope was a quality that existed in people of non-action. I always associated hope with weakness, a whimsical quality rooted in lack or action and insecurity. I always thought we reserved hope for something we ultimately knew we would never hold."
Just hoping you’ll be something mostly means you’re not putting much effort into becoming that something. It’s like the action of hoping dissolves your try.
It’s lazy.
On the other hand, “negativity” is always frowned upon. When the overly optimistic people come up to me and say - "Soon, I’ll be a star, a millionaire, and surely, one day I will get that Oscar too, I just know it, I'm destined, I have hope” - it’s lazy.
Carving an actual career does not only require hope, it actually requires very hard work. It requires a surgical precision of thought, plan, and action; realistically knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Are talent and hope on the opposite side of the spectrum? Like Thor and Loki? Is talent and drive the opposite of hope and non-action?
It’s like hoping liberates you from any pain of - try. The pain of doing. Thinking you’re worthy of hope, but not worthy of an actual effort?
Are you a dreamer or a DOER?