As much as I’d like to warm you up—offer you a drink, maybe a canapé (probably just some microwave popcorn), I’m just going to dive right in. Life’s too short to mess around with a hefty preamble when I have a question that will reach deep into your soul and either enrich it or eviscerate it. Life: it’s a gamble!

Are you ready? Maybe sit with both feet on the ground? Take a deep breath? Crack your knuckles if you have to.

You still don’t look ready but I don’t have all day to wait.

Here goes:

To what extent do you believe “the best is yet to come”?

Like, in your life (not this gong show of a world 🫠).

Oh, wait, I forgot the scale:

For over 20 years now, the people over at Gallup have been asking people to “imagine a ladder, with the lowest rung representing the worst possible life and the highest rung representing the best possible life.”

Survey participants are asked (and now you are being asked this, right now) these two questions:

1. On which step of the ladder would you say you’re standing on right now, at this very moment in time?
2. On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?

There are three zones you can fall into (suffering, struggling, and thriving), and if you want to read more about them, click here. For today’s discussion we’re going to focus on question # 2, though… your views about the future.

In 2025, about 59% of U.S. adults expected their lives to be “high quality” in five years. That means a clear majority still believes the future will be better than the present. Great! But also? Because I’m not sure if you know how data works? That stat also reveals 41% of U.S. adults believe their future in five years will be rife with cataclysmic, unmitigated misfortune. (I do love hyperbole.) So if you’re in a Zoom meeting today with 10 people, four of the people in the squares envision a future that’s worse than today. Are you one of the four doomsayers? Or are you one of the six who believes things are going to be better in the future?

Optimism is defined as the tendency to expect good things in the future. Some people just walk around with a general disposition of believing good times are ahead, and if that’s not you, worry not. You can work on building optimism through a personality transplant reading books like this one.

Hope—optimism’s more action-oriented cousin—is defined as “the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.”

So hope isn’t wishful thinking—it’s a plan you act on. Drawing on hope theory…

1. Pick one goal that matters to you this week. Write down two or three concrete pathways towards reaching it, and commit to the smallest next step you can take today. Today is different than tomorrow—just to clarify.
2. When you hit a snag, come up with an alternate route instead of quitting and punching your fist through the drywall.
3. Remind yourself of a past win to fuel your agency (“I can do this, because I’ve done it before—like that time I ______”). Keep this little cycle tight: act, adjust, act again… because hope grows from movement, not sitting with your foot tapping impatiently on the floor with a pissy look on your face.

This is a great book if you want to build your hoping skills (hoping skills, not coping skills, haha).

Let’s start to actively believe the best is yet to come, not just because we’re passively waiting for good things to happen to us. Let’s make these next Mondays astonishingly alive. You with me? I hope so. (Get it? Hope? I know. I need to get out more.)