October 14, 2026- Hope will never be enough

Hope is a start. But hope needs action to win victories.

~David Schwartz

There is the great Burgess Meredith line from the movie Grumpier Old Men, where he exclaimed in the middle of the grocery store, “Well, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled up first!“

Hope will never be enough. Hope deflects responsibility away from our own actions and places them on some cosmic game of chance that may or may not work out in our favor.

We must keep in mind that work is more formative than outcomes. We are not changed by the fact that we hit the finish line before our target time. We are changed by the grind of training for that race, on days when we felt like it and on days when we didn’t. The change was not brought about by hoping we would meet a goal; the change was from the work we did to make it happen.

Ultimately, we do not control all our outcomes. If we can accept and make peace with that, we can narrow our focus to the things we do control – our actions and our reactions. We will not realize all the outcomes we hope for, but we can turn ourselves into the people we hope to be, and that is far more important.

We are not our circumstances; we are our choices. Let’s build a better version of ourselves through action.