You’ve got to have hope.
Not blind faith. This business is way too influenced by luck for that. Not a realistic assessment of your chances. Your chances are way too uncertain for that. Hope.
Hope is the feeling that you could achieve something with a bit of luck, with a bit of skill, with a bit of perseverance. Hope is the feeling that what you do matters, that you can influence the world around you in a positive way. Hope is what makes life in uncertain times possible. It doesn’t really matter what your business is, how uncertain it is, or what you’re writing, or creating, or hoping for.
You need hope simply to survive.
If you don’t have hope, you will start to struggle.
Because when you don’t have hope, you are vulnerable to the feeling that what you do doesn’t matter, that no matter how much effort you spend, you won’t achieve anything.
That’s what makes creating hard. That’s what makes any endeavor hard. The feeling that it’s pointless.
Ever seen an army fall apart? It’s not because the enemy is stronger, or more skilled, or has better guns. It’s not because they’ve been bombed, or shelled, or starved. It’s because they lose hope. They fall prey to the feeling they can’t make things better. That anything they do is going to make things worse. They look at the opposition and know that they themselves will die.
That’s what you’re struggling against.
But maybe you’re one of those people with supreme willpower that can just decide to do things that are beyond them, that can force themselves to do things that are hopeless or meaningless or useless just because they agreed to it or they’re getting paid for it.
I’m not one of them.
I need hope to get up in the morning. I need hope to sit down and cross off yet another day of writing on my calendar. I need hope to find the joy in my writing.
Because I’m writing not only for me. It’s not enough that I entertain myself. I’m also writing for you, and for anyone who might like to read what I write. I’m writing with the hope of changing my own situation, my job, my income streams, my career, my future. I’m writing with the hope of somehow, in some minor way, improving the world around me.
I can never know that I’m doing that. I can never know that I’m going to achieve that, never be certain.
But I can hope, and sometimes that hope is all it takes to start creating.
