Ditch the Doom | Reject Despair and Embrace Gritty Hope

The BOLD | The Doom Song

We’re all feeling it, and we cannot afford to continue like this. Despair is a seductive trap that will consume our energy, our focus, and our creativity. Hope is waiting for us to wake up, catch on, and follow her.

This is a revolution, in the motion sense of the word. It’s time to come full circle, again.

To get where we can go, we need to turn, to rotate, to revolve in a circle that brings us all the way around to a place that is familiar and foreign, full of ancient wisdom and bright with the promise that only imagination and creativity can deliver. We need to go back and go forward.

This is the Ditch the Doom revolution.

When I say doom, I am not specifically referencing political unrest, climate change, depression, anxiety, war, disease, and alien invasion. Instead, this is about our response to big challenges and deep fear. What do we do with all of that stuff and more?

We cannot afford the questionable luxury of doom thinking, a self-fulfilling prophecy of resignation, stagnation, and idle grumbling.

We must embrace the thing that has always saved humanity. This is about us, each of us and all of us. This is about practical, roll-up-your-sleeves, gritty hope.

The Whisper | The Hope Song

There is a crescendo clanging in our ears and thrumming in our chests right now. The doom song is as old as conscious thought. Every generation has sung it at some volume, some louder than others. The doom decibels are excruciating right now.

The song goes something like this:

We are doomed.

We’re past the point of hope.

There’s nothing we can do.

Look how weird things have gotten.

We’ve never been more (fill in the blank) and we’ve never been less (Fill in this blank, too).

We are screwed.

We hear it rippling in the back of our conversations. It is bellowed from podiums and puffed into microphones. It is the background music on the internet and the theme inspiration for our entertainment. Neighbors and colleagues offer it as a greeting.

It is relentless, and seductive, and sneaky.

As I said, every generation sings their verses of this song. Likewise, in every generation, there is a group of people who hears the dolorous tune and thinks, “Who says?” They then get busy crafting the way forward.

Some of those people have their pictures honored on classroom bulletin boards about heroes and are featured in Did-You-Know history videos online. We know their names and marvel at their stories. 

Some of those people have names that have melted into the flow of time. They contributed their survival, the thread of their wisdom, and their DNA. We are here because of the famous and the everyday heroes who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

That group chose to sing the hope song, a narrative rooted in creativity, curiosity, courage, love, faith, and action.

Each of us has a choice to sing one song or the other. We must choose because the tunes can’t be sung in harmony. Pick a lyric.

As I mentioned, this is a revolution. And I, the Revolutionary, am going to stay with you, to indict you, incite you, inspire you, and ignite you. Gird your loins. Like most journeys that matter, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

The potholes and pitfalls are there. I’m not pretending they’re not. It’s our choice. We can roll right into those holes, break our axles, and not come out the other side. We can drive around them and leave them to burst someone else’s tires. We can fill them the haphazardly, the way we always have, with insufficient piles of steaming asphalt that will wear away again.

Or we can engineer a new road, a new vehicle, a new way to move from place to place or a new method to not have to drive that way at all.

Since we’re going to ride into the future one way or another, my job is to convince you to play the Hope song, roll the windows down, and sing with gusto.

To do that, we answer hope’s call with the pre-installed toolkit our ancestors honed for us. We accept, discover, polish, and transmit this inheritance. 

Gritty Hope is Demanding

Consider hope. How does she look in your mind? We’ve been conditioned to think of her as something external, a kind fluffy thing that waits patiently for us, holding sweet, but unrealistic possibilities.  Her offer feels like a luxury or a childish whim.

Real Hope is, however, demanding. When you understand what she is offering, your action is required. Real hope is gritty. She is pragmatic and under no illusion about the difficulties, the mess, and the fear.

To Ditch the Doom, we must answer her call. We must answer her and we must create her. Hope is often a matter of taking action before we really believe she is there.

Three things generate and sustain hope. This is the toolkit our resilient , relentless, brilliant ancestors used to get us to this moment. Now it is our turn to use them.

Tool 1: Courage

Doom is tuned to fear. In a round, we layer external inputs like news stories, gossip, whispered threats, and ominous announcements with internal stories fueled by our fears. Fear is our response to perceived threats.

Courage is a powerful response to fear. We see the threat, we identify the stakes, we feel the fear,and we choose to act in spite of the threat and the fear.

It takes courage to face the news. It takes courage to take action when hope seems to be hiding. It takes courage to stand up when everyone around you is hiding behind metaphorical rocks.

It takes courage to sing a new song when culture, experience, and habit seem to demand an old, easy, dangerous tune.

Thought sometimes benefits from courage. Action often needs courage. Hope always requires courage.

Tool 2: Collaboration

The first level of collaboration is community. We work with our family to find and care for resources to build a life together. We work with our team to build a marketable product that solves a problem and generates profit. We join clubs, gather with friends, seek out familiar faces and comfortable spaces.

For many, community is a buffer from fear. Blending in feels like protection. For some, community is a foundation that sustains courage. Belonging drives purpose. Collaboration in community is a good start.

To Ditch the Doom, however, we will need to pursue the next level of collaboration. We must reach across community lines to collaborate with people with whom we don’t yet feel connected. We must learn to collaborate with people with whom we disagree, who annoy us, who we may even perceive as a threat.

Collaboration across communities brings needed perspective and resources. It engages more minds in the planning and more hands in the work. It teaches us tunes we don’t yet know how to sing.

Tool 3: Creativity

We are rooted in the past. A good future benefits from this grounding because it is where our wisdom and our knowledge come from.

A good future requires creativity, the capacity to envision what doesn’t exist yet, generate solutions that have never happened before, and design what is new to answer novel challenges.

Creativity is a skill that can be honed, a state that can be invited, and a view that can be sharpened. It is fueled by courage and supported by collaboration. And it is the toll we pay to travel the fastest, smoothest, most elegant roads to the future.

What Now?

I’ve been talking about this for a while now. It underpins the work that I do with my clients. It keeps me up at night and gets me going in the morning. 

What happens if we dampen doom, embrace hope, and get to work doing what each of us is uniquely gifted and honed to do here? 

What encourages courage? 

What builds bridges between communities? 

What sparks creativity? 

I want to explore this more. I’m paying attention to the heroes of the future, the soon-to-appear-on-bulletin-boards heroes and the quiet heroes. I have plans. This is the start, the declaration. I can’t wait to see where this goes. Where we go. I have some ideas and I’m excited to see what we can build together.

It’s time to Ditch the Doom. Let’s turn up the volume, belt out the hope song, and hit the road together.