Endurance Required
Earlier this summer I embarked on a journey with a group of wonderful individuals who took Seth Godin’s The Bootstrapper’s Workshop. The goal was simple: build something. This newsletter and Radical Optimists are the end result.
I built something. It’s a good start. But I know there’s more work to do. A lot more work. One reader said it wasn’t enough and asked this:
“Can you go deeper and explain how radical optimism moves us from one state to another? We all think of gratitude - but it’s hard to embrace gratitude when the world is crumbling around us. Gratitude does not equate to optimism, so get me there.”
She threw it down and I’ll try to pick it up: some of us aren’t in a place where gratitude is enough. Some of us look outside our window and it isn’t pretty. Some of us are still looking for the basics, like justice and equality. Things are not where they need to be and no amount of gratitude will fix that.
Or will it? Maybe we can be thankful that action can be taken, and then take it. Maybe it’s doing one small thing to change our truth, and in so doing maybe change the truths of others. It will be too slow, it can seem at times like nothing at all is happening, but Radical Optimism is about being committed to the long game. Finding the strength to do something today, tomorrow, and the next 100 days after that. To build something that matters.
Radical Optimism = the belief in that possibility.
It could start quite simply: by doing something kind for someone else. Or drawing a version of the Mona Lisa. Or decoding poetry by Maya Angelou. This could in turn move us from one state to another, holding up the world with the little things we do, day after day, day after day. Not easy, but needed.
Slow but sure. Endurance required.
Exercise: Write your version of the below, a poem by Maya Angelou.
