that hope and led them right into Nokia’s shadow. Just as hope can conquer al , false hope can ruin everything , as wel . What Motorola needed was to see what a hopeless future analog real y had and that if they continued to hope that it would sustain them, they were going to be in trouble . That kind of hope was a problem.
False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity. It is our biggest problem because not seeing the reality that needs to be dealt with is what is in between us and what we desire. And it is always our biggest opportunity because if we see it and grasp it, that reality, we can find a real way that will work , one rooted in things as they real y are, to get what we desire.
Shimer saw the false hope of thinking that Welch Al yn could continue to have the same success without a platform once a platform world had emerged. She grasped the hopelessness of that plan, put her arms firmly around it, and changed the entire company to get in line with the reality of where the future growth wil be. Her hopelessness led her to the strategic planning session that gave rise to the platform. The hopelessness of the reality problem they had led her to possibly the greatest opportunity in the history of the company. This is why it is vital to “get hopeless.” It can lead you to everything you want.
And this is not only true for business. I met with a woman who had gotten to the pruning moment in her marriage. She final y realized that her attempts to get her addict husband to dry out, her efforts to talk to him about his drinking, were not working. At last, she was “done.” In her mind, the situation was final y hopeless, and it was time to divorce. That was a breakthrough. She was giving up hope that what she had been doing was going to help.
But what she did not realize was that her hopelessness was also a great opportunity to get a new and different plan, one that had a chance of reaching her goal: a sober husband. Just as Shimer did not have to get out of the device business and sel the company when she realized that the old way would not work, I reminded this woman that she did not necessarily have to divorce her husband. The good news she needed to hear was that she was final y in a place to do something that might actual y help.
Once she saw that her own strategies were hopeless, she could final y get a new plan that might sober him up. We put a plan together that included a professional intervention, using the leverage of his other significant relationships, professional treatment, and enacting consequences.
She implemented it, and it worked. He went to rehab, is sober now, has been for a long time, and there is realistic hope for the future. But it only came about because she got to the hopeless moment of her former way of operating. So sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself. But we can’t get to the new hope of the new plan if we don’t face the reality that what we have been doing is not working.
So if hope is good but false hope is not, how do we know the difference between the two? How do we know when to hang on to hope and when to grasp the hopelessness that we need to grasp to do something different? We need a good diagnostic.
Wishing Versus Hoping
It is imperative that you give up hope if your hope is not hope at al but just an empty wish. But how do we know the difference between wishing and hoping?
When most people talk about tomorrow and wanting something in their lives to be different or to get better, they use the word hope . Dictionary definitions of hope contain two elements. The first is a “desire or expectation” for something in the future to occur. “I hope this thing turns around.”
The second is usual y “grounds for believing” that something in the
False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity. It is our biggest problem because not seeing the reality that needs to be dealt with is what is in between us and what we desire. And it is always our biggest opportunity because if we see it and grasp it, that reality, we can find a real way that will work , one rooted in things as they real y are, to get what we desire.
Shimer saw the false hope of thinking that Welch Al yn could continue to have the same success without a platform once a platform world had emerged. She grasped the hopelessness of that plan, put her arms firmly around it, and changed the entire company to get in line with the reality of where the future growth wil be. Her hopelessness led her to the strategic planning session that gave rise to the platform. The hopelessness of the reality problem they had led her to possibly the greatest opportunity in the history of the company. This is why it is vital to “get hopeless.” It can lead you to everything you want.
And this is not only true for business. I met with a woman who had gotten to the pruning moment in her marriage. She final y realized that her attempts to get her addict husband to dry out, her efforts to talk to him about his drinking, were not working. At last, she was “done.” In her mind, the situation was final y hopeless, and it was time to divorce. That was a breakthrough. She was giving up hope that what she had been doing was going to help.
But what she did not realize was that her hopelessness was also a great opportunity to get a new and different plan, one that had a chance of reaching her goal: a sober husband. Just as Shimer did not have to get out of the device business and sel the company when she realized that the old way would not work, I reminded this woman that she did not necessarily have to divorce her husband. The good news she needed to hear was that she was final y in a place to do something that might actual y help.
Once she saw that her own strategies were hopeless, she could final y get a new plan that might sober him up. We put a plan together that included a professional intervention, using the leverage of his other significant relationships, professional treatment, and enacting consequences.
She implemented it, and it worked. He went to rehab, is sober now, has been for a long time, and there is realistic hope for the future. But it only came about because she got to the hopeless moment of her former way of operating. So sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself. But we can’t get to the new hope of the new plan if we don’t face the reality that what we have been doing is not working.
So if hope is good but false hope is not, how do we know the difference between the two? How do we know when to hang on to hope and when to grasp the hopelessness that we need to grasp to do something different? We need a good diagnostic.
Wishing Versus Hoping
It is imperative that you give up hope if your hope is not hope at al but just an empty wish. But how do we know the difference between wishing and hoping?
When most people talk about tomorrow and wanting something in their lives to be different or to get better, they use the word hope . Dictionary definitions of hope contain two elements. The first is a “desire or expectation” for something in the future to occur. “I hope this thing turns around.”
The second is usual y “grounds for believing” that something in the
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