Micro Class: What Is Hope? (+ Why does it matter?)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on what is hope? It's inspired by making hope happen by Shane Lopez. Shane Lopez is the world's leading researcher studying the science of hope. So what is hope from a scientific perspective? That's what we're going to talk about is in this little session. First, what we need to do is differentiate hope from fantasizing and dwelling. So hope is not fantasizing. Fantasizing is basically when you imagine a perfect future and that's all you imagine, right? It's just sunshine and roses and of course, unicorns flying over rainbows. Nothing ever goes wrong as you're fantasizing, right?

Not helpful.

We've talked about that in a number of different contexts. We'll leave it at that for now. Then there's dwelling. Dwelling is no, there's clouds over the sun, right? It's all negative all the time. I'm just thinking about what's wrong. Obviously that's not helpful. The most healthy orientation to the future is hope. Hope basically combines the best of both fantasizing and dwelling. It's like Gabriel Oettingen's mental contrasting, right? Where you have your ideal future, there's your wish of your ideal, but then you also contrast it with the obstacles that will get in the way, right? Mental contrasting is what she called it in her scientific research, which Shane Lopez references, shows unequivocally this is way more powerful than fantasizing. Now, hope has three components to it that we want to know about and that I'm excited to chat about. The first aspect of hope is having a hopeful sense of a better future. So kind of the definition of hope is that you think your future is going to be better than your present. In order to have that, you need to have clear goals.

Now, that's not enough, right?

Just having goals could be fantasizing. You also have to have a sense of what researchers call agency. Agency is a fancy word for confidence or sense of empowerment. You can actually achieve your goals, right? So here you are, you have goals, you have agency. Those are the first two components. The third component is this, the pathway to achieve the goal. So you want to go from here to there, and you have pathways, but it's with an S plural. You don't just have one path, right? You have multiple pathways. This is huge. A lot of people think that this is the way it's going to work. They're going to have a vision, they're going to. They're going to start working toward it and oh, My goodness. The moment they hit an obstacle on this path, they feel overwhelmed and they give up because they spent most of their time fantasizing.

Then they just start dwelling about how.

Nothing ever comes to fruition the way we want. We need to know two things. We need to know that there's always more than one pathway and that all of those pathways to our goals have obstacles. You're never going to come up with a pathway that's going to be perfect, and if you did, then you didn't set a bold enough goal. Anything that's that easy to achieve wasn't worth pursuing. Right? So goals, agency, pathways. That's a quick look at the three components of hope, differentiating it from fantasizing and dwelling. In the next few micro classes, we're going to unpack goals in more detail, agencies in more detail, and pathways in more detail. But for now, there you go.

That is hopefully hey guys, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know what I do beyond these YouTube videos I put up, so I thought I'd give you a quick tour of our membership platform. Thousands of people have joined us already. 10 bucks a month get access to a ton of stuff that's in addition to what I put up on YouTube for free. So the basic idea is you just watched a micro class. Hope you enjoyed that. I share. I just started doing these micro classes, but I Now share over 50 of these per month. We've shared dozens so far and it's basically a quick class on my absolute favorite stuff across the different domains of optimal living. Two to three maybe five minute little micro classes on how to optimize your life. In addition to that, you get access to every single one of our philosopher's notes. We now have over 250 philosopher's notes on some really, really good books. A lot of them in each one of them. You're familiar with the PNTV videos if you've watched many of those. But we also have PDFs and MP3s of our Philosopher's notes. So here's let's take a look at what a PDF looks like. This is an example of a Philosopher's Note, a six page PDF where I basically share some of my favorite thoughts, riff on it, talk about how other teachers say the same things, and give you a nice playful kick in the butt to go out and apply the wisdom that is a Philosopher's Note. I record that as an MP3 that you can download as well. And 250 of those, I produce 10 of those at least per month. That I share with you in addition to the micro classes and and then you also get access to all of our old classes. We have the five day immersion, reboot habits 101, confidence 101, getting stuff done 101, meditation 101 and then future classes including relationships 101, energy 101, purpose 101, biz 101, goals 101, etc. So there you go. Really blessed to have some extraordinary support and I will share with you where you go to sign up. I'll put a link to this, but basically cruise on over here. You can sign up. And this is the kind of response we've gotten so far from our members. It's pretty neat. I've made more positive changes in my life, my brief membership, only three months so far, than I did through years of counseling. Yes. Brian Johnson, you are a rock star. Thank you very much. That's very kind of you. And I'm making huge strides in optimizing my life as a result of your philosopher's notes and optimal living classes. I spend $19 a month on my gym membership to take care of my body. A mere $10 a month on an optimal living membership is the biggest value investment I've ever made in my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Thank you for the incredible work you're doing to inspire us to be rock stars in our own lives. Unbelievably inspiring and humbling. In 24 hours, we received hundreds of extraordinary notes from members around the world. So there you go. That's a quick look at what we're up to. 10 bucks a month. Hope to astonish you. There you go.