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I’m hopeful for the future.
Back in 2022, when I first started sharing online, it felt like I was publishing into a void. I’d spend hours on side projects - the pod, the newsletter, these essays - only to be met with silence.
It made me wonder if I was wasting time.
But I told myself, “Even if nothing came of these projects in the near-term, investing in myself would pay off in the long run.”
This rationale was only partially true. Because even though I believed investing in myself was crucial to my future, if I knew with certainty that nothing would come of these passion projects, I wouldn’t have invested the time.
Hope - for what might be possible - kept me going.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate how important hope is to the human condition. In Man’s Search For Meaning (1946), Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl wrote:
“Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.”
Throughout my twenties, I’ve often looked at life from the POV of an asset allocator. The major “asset classes” in life being (1) time, (2) money, and (3) relationships. “If I could just create abundance in each of these categories,” I would tell myself, “then I’d win at the game of life”.
Today, I still think this framework is useful. But it’s incomplete.
It doesn’t account for hope.
Without hope, having all the money, relationships, and time in the world means very little. On the other hand, if you’re “poor” in these major categories of wealth but have great hope for the future, you enjoy a special richness to life.
Monitor your hope. How much of it you have. Where it comes from. How you can get more. And be careful about trading it for things you might perceive as “good”: status, riches, security, etc.
In early 2022, I had regular conversations with ~10 people on topics I was curious about. By 2023, that number grew to ~25 people. And today, that number is north of 50 and growing quickly.
It’s one thing to understand the principle of compounding and another to feel and experience it. Nowadays, I can tell I’m no longer publishing into a void. I’m publishing to a community of kind, curious, and creative people from all walks of life.
I’m not sure what the future holds but I’ve never been more hopeful.
