Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (36 page)

Economics professor Armenio Rego
: Personal communication, May 22, 2012; A. Rego, F. Machado, S. Leal, and M. P. E. Cunha, “Are hopeful employees more creative? An empirical study,”
Creativity Research Journal
21, no. 2 (2009): 223–31.

Without hope, Rego points out
: Ibid.

there was
no relationship between hope and income:
“Relationships between hope, income, and teacher-student ratio in March 2009 Gallup Student Poll,” unpublished data, 2009.

Recent research has found no consistent
: S. J. Lopez et al., “Hope for the evolution of diversity: On leveling the field of dreams,” in C. R. Snyder, ed.,
Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Intervention
(San Diego: Academic Press, 2000), pp. 223–42; L. M. Edwards, A. Ong, and S. J. Lopez, “Hope measurement in Mexican American youth,”
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
29 (2007): 225–41.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck
: C. Dweck,
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
(New York: Random House, 2006).

“It was an uncomfortable thing”
: L. Trei, “New study yields instructive results on how mindset affects learning,”
Stanford Report,
February 7, 2007.

“You mean, I don’t have to be dumb?”
: Ibid.

Young Tererai was blessed
: Tererai Trent’s story was first shared by Nicholas Kristof. See both his article “Triumph of a Dreamer,”
New York Times
, Nov. 14, 2009, and his book for more details. N. D. Kristof and S. WuDunn,
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
(New York: Knopf, 2009).

Then in 1991, when Tererai
:
http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Tererai-Trents-Story-Video
.
http://www.oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trents-Inspiring-Education/3
www.oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trent-Returns-to-Zimbabwe
.

In October 2011, Tererai Trent returned
: T. Mukwazhi, “Tererai Trent Pursues Her Dream,”
www.dailnews.co.zw
, Oct. 13, 2011.

Chapter 8: The Past Is Not a Preview

Joe Kraus, an investing partner at Google Ventures
:
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/19/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon-valley-loves-and-hates
.

Known as Meehl’s maxim
: P. Meehl,
Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction
(New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1954). Additional research supported Meehl’s findings: W. M. Grove, D. H. Zald, A. M. Hallberg, B. Lebow, E. Snitz, and C. Nelson, “Clinical versus mechanical prediction: A meta-analysis,”
Psychological Assessment
12 (2000): 19–30. The findings have been widely cited and have been taught in universities for about half a century. See
http://whartonmagazine.com/blog/moneyball-for-managers-paul-meehls-legacy
.

Study after study suggests that skilled experts
: Kahneman,
Thinking, Fast and Slow
.

“unduly embittered about their past”
: M. E. P. Seligman,
Authentic Happiness
(New York: Free Press, 2002), p. xii.

In his leadership book,
It Worked for Me:
C. Powell and T. Koltz,
It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
(New York: Harper, 2012).

“When did you graduate”
: Ibid., p. 271.

“My city believed”
: Ibid., p. 273.

“Past performance alone”
: Ibid., p. 67.

“Learning and growing intellectually”
: Ibid., p. 68.

“Always be prepared to change your mind”
: Ibid., p. 70.

Indeed, in samples of grade school
: S. P. Buckelew, R. S. Crittendon, J. D. Butkovic, K. B. Price, and M. Hurst, “Hope as a predictor of academic performance,”
Psychological Reports
103 (2008): 411–14; J. Ciarrochi, P. C. Heaven, and F. Davies, “The impact of hope, self-esteem, and attributional style on adolescents’ school grades and emotional well-being: A longitudinal study,”
Journal of Research in Personality
41 (2007): 1161–78; L. A. Curry, C. R. Snyder, D. L. Cook, B. C. Ruby, and M. Rehm, “Role of hope in academic and sport achievement,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
73 (1997): 1257–67; M. W. Gallagher and S. J. Lopez, “Hope, self-efficacy, and academic success in college students,” poster presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Boston, 2008; R. Gilman, J. Dooley, and D. Florell, “Relative levels of hope and their relationship with academic and psychological indicators among adolescents,”
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 25
(2006): 166–78; S. C. Marques, J. L. Pais-Ribeiro, and S. J. Lopez, “The role of positive psychology constructs in predicting mental
health and academic achievement in children and adolescents: A two-year longitudinal study,”
Journal of Happiness Studies
12, no. 6 (2011): 1049–62.

Fear signals come from
: M. Davis and J. P. Aggleton, eds.,
The Amygdala: Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion, Memory, and Mental Dysfunction
(New York: Wiley, 1992).

Hope, in contrast
: S. J. Peterson, P. A. Balthazard, D. A. Waldman, and R. W. Thatcher, “Neuroscientific implications of psychological capital: Are the brains of optimistic, hopeful, confident, and resilient leaders different?,”
Organizational Dynamics
37 (2008): 342–53.

When Jane Brody
:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/a-richer-life-by-seeing-the-glass-half-full/
.

This is the message of research
: B. Fredrickson,
Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive
(New York: Crown Archetype, 2009).

In one experiment, Frederickson asked groups
: B. L. Fredrickson, “What good are positive emotions?,”
Review of General Psychology
2 (1998): 300–19.

“The best therapists do not merely heal”
: M. E. P. Seligman,
Authentic Happiness
(New York: Free Press, 2002), p. xiv.

We are naturally risk-averse creatures
: For a discussion of how this is manifested in daily life, read the discussion of loss aversion in Kahneman,
Thinking, Fast and Slow
.

With the proper license
: Erin Zimmer, “So you want to start a food truck?,” Openforum.com, Dec. 20, 2010,
https://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/innovation/article/so-you-want-to-start-a-food-truck-erin-zimmer
.

Roy Choi’s opening
: Katy McLaughlin, “The king of the streets moves indoors,”
Wall Street Journal
, Jan. 15, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704842604574642420732091490.html
.

Kristin Frederick
: Julia Moskin, “Food trucks in Paris? U.S. cuisine finds open minds, and mouths,”
New York Times
, June 3, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/europe/food-trucks-add-american-flavor-to-paris.html?pagewanted=all
.

I got every kind of push-back
: Ibid.

Nate Demars became a business owner
:
http://www.columbusalive.com/content/stories/2011/09/15/fashion-pursuit.html
.

“It’s a fresh idea in a boring old business”
: Ibid.;
http://www.businessinsider.com/17-most-creative-pop-up-stores?op=1#ixzz1yuRQH4fb
.

Inspired by the design
:
http://www.cultofmac.com/174696/sonos-subs-shape-was-designed-by-the-/files/78/f78/public/
.

Chapter 9: Futurecasting: Making Your Goals Come Alive

But until Old Doc Brown
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future
.

Of the twenty thousand chunks of experience
:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/nobel-laureate-daniel-kahneman-toward-a-science-of/3546434
.

This ladder exercise
: This exercise was developed by Hadley Cantril. It is formally referred as the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. H. Cantril,
The Pattern of Human Concern
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965).

An athletic six feet, six inches
: “A Health Approach Replaces Self-Pity with Promise,” Nadia Reiman, producer, for NPR Storycorps, Oct. 21, 2009.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113830758;
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/10/man_keeps_promise_after_physic.html
.

two psychology colleagues and I
: M. W. Gallagher, S. J. Lopez, and S. D. Pressman, “Optimism is universal: Exploring the presence and benefits of optimism in a representative sample of the world,”
Journal of Personality
(2013).

In the 1990s, I learned how SMART
: Though frequently attributed to goal theorists or management experts, it is unclear who first used the acronym SMART.

You boost your energy when you state goals positively
: C. J. Roney, E. T. Higgins, and J. Shah, “Goals and framing: How outcome focus influences motivation and emotion,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
21 (1995): 1151–60.

Psychologists call these
salient goals:
S. Ratneshwar, L. W. Barsalou, C. Pechmann, and M. Moore, “Goal-derived categories: The role of personal and situational goals in category representations,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
10 (2001): 147–57.

Have you ever washed a rental car?
: See
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/neoliberalism
for a discussion of when and how this term is used. For more discussion see Terry Anderson and Laura E. Huggins, “No one washes a rental car,”
Defining Ideas: A Hoover Institution Journal
, November 5, 2008,
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/5498
.

That’s why Principal built a simple
:
http://dreamagain.principal.com/dreamcatcher/preregistered/home.html
. A free program that allows you to create a visual collage of the images that capture your life goals.

The resulting book of student essays
: Omaha Young Writers Program,
In My Shoes: Teen Reflections on Hope and the Future
(Omaha, NE: WriteLife, 2011).

This exercise subtly reminds students
: This exercise is based on Appendix 1 from B. Kerr, S. Kurpius, and A. Harkins,
Handbook for Counseling Girls and Women: Ten Years of Gender Equity Research at Arizona State University
(Mesa, AZ: Neuva Science Press, 2005).

Then you go beyond visiting
: P. W. Gollwitzer, “Implementation intention: Strong effects of simple plans,”
American Psychologist
54 (1999): 493–503.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld
: Personal archives,
http://www.jerryseinfeld.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Cz-LK16g4
.

Hal Hershfield, assistant professor
: Hershfield is an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and researches judgment, decision-making, and social psychology, with special emphasis on “how thinking about time can impact decision-making and emotional experience.”
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/hal-hershfield
.

In one study, Hershfield
: H. E. Hershfield et al., “Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self,”
Journal of Marketing Research
158 (2011): 23–37.

A trip to the mobile app Aging Booth
: A mobile-phone-based software application that converts photographs of users into older versions of themselves, it allows a preview into the future and helps users imagine more vividly their future selves.

The website futureme.org
: A free website that allows people to send their future selves a letter, to be delivered via email at a prespecified date.

Hershfield says that if he’d thought long term
:
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/alpha-consumer/2012/02/13/how-to-meet-your-future-selfand-save
.

Do you have an older friend
: Ibid.

Chapter 10: Triggering Action: Putting Agency on Autopilot

Jos Van Bedoff
: Robert Krulwich, “There’s a Fly In My Urinal,” NPR,
http://www.economist.com/node/21554506#footnote1
.

Whether he knew it or not
: Ibid. A cottage industry has sprung up from this bit of insight about male bathroom habits.

No harder than spreading the common cold
: For a survey of work on goal contagions, go to
http://www.goallab.nl/index.php?page=about-the-goallab
.

Social psychologist Henk Aarts
: H. Aarts, P. M. Gollwitzer, and R. R. Hassin,
“Goal contagion: Perceiving is for pursuing,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
87 (2004): 23–37.

For example, he’s shown
: R. R. Hassin, H. Aarts, and M. J. Ferguson, “Automatic goal inferences,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
41 (2005): 129–40.

Psychologist and blogger Art Markman:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200810/the-power-yard-signs-i-goal-contagion
.