Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (8 page)

That day almost a century later, Chuck felt his first spark of entrepreneurism. He wanted to start his own microbrewery. But he knew he had a lot to learn. As he said, “
This led me to dabble in home brewing and from there to keep track of what was slowly emerging on the west coast with small breweries like New Albion and Anchor Steam.”
Meanwhile, he and three friends helped open a grocery store (where Rose Naughtin, the young woman who has had two heart transplants, now
works as a baker) that anticipated today’s local-foods movement and became a social hub for people interested in healthy eating.

Fast-forward twelve years.
Chuck’s start-up brewery was off the ground, but barely. He was out of money and down to his last credit card, which he was using to charge groceries at a neighborhood gas station. In a week, he would be out of business and unable to hold off creditors. In a last-ditch effort, he set out to find investors among his friends and neighbors—people willing to bet on him and his ideas.

Money wasn’t Chuck’s only problem. Prohibition was long gone, but it was still illegal to sell alcoholic beverages by the glass anywhere in Kansas. That meant he also needed to convince conservative-thinking legislators to change the 1881 law that had run the Walruffs out of business. Finally, in 1989, Chuck’s restaurant and beer garden, Free State Brewery, opened its doors—the first licensed brewery in Kansas in more than a century.

Today, Chuck’s local supporters have only one regret. “As I’ve said many times, I wish I had mortgaged my house and bought all I could,” one early investor lamented. “It has been such an immense success.” Those who passed on the chance are reminded of their missed opportunity every time they wait for a table at Free State Brewery, surrounded by happy, chatty patrons sampling local and seasonal beers while taking in the view of the compact, fourteen-barrel brewhouse through a two-story wall of glass.

As the business grew, Chuck’s friends and customers repeatedly asked him to bottle his beer so they could take it home and share it with friends. Again, there were legal hurdles—this time old laws that restricted the transport of distilled beverages within Kansas and across state lines.
It took another campaign to get the laws changed, but by 2008, Free State was ready to open what Chuck’s employees called a “Frankenstein” bottling plant—welded together from parts found around the world and from many different machines with mysterious past lives.

Then one night, only weeks before he would flip the switch and deliver the first six-pack, Chuck got a call from his security company, summoning him to the bottling plant. “On the drive over, from about two blocks away, I started seeing lights and smoke,” he recalled. “I had that sinking feeling that it was going to be something that had a real major impact on us.” The plant was on fire and all of the machinery was destroyed. Insurance covered the physical damage totaling over $1 million, but did little to address the psychological toll.

Faced with starting over almost from scratch and with the Great Recession beginning to show its effects on the economy, Chuck could easily have chosen to walk away. “You can think of one thousand different reasons not to do something,” he told a local reporter. “To some extent you have to gauge those risks. On a one-year or two-year basis, this is probably a terrible time. Even before we suffered the setback with the fire, I was telling people, ‘We’ll know in five years whether this was a good decision.’ ” The one thing he was sure he had going for him: an economic downturn is great for beer sales.

Chuck took the long view and, as many small business owners do every day, chose hope again and again when it would have been easier to give up and move on. When the odds are against them, hopeful people like Chuck become even more resolute and persistent, exhibiting something like a compulsion to finish what they started. They hold fast to their vision, maintain their excitement about their goal, and, when one path or resource is shut down, find new routes to their desired future.

The Free Staters rebuilt.
The bottling facility became less a Rube Goldberg operation and more a modern, energy-efficient plant, and Magerl’s first batch of beer rolled off the line and into stores in May 2010. Three years later, Free State six-packs and cases are in several metro markets around the state, with distribution soon to expand to other states. At full capacity, they could brew 23 million bottles a year.
“That is well beyond anything we have planned,” Magerl said. “But we have the capacity to go, and we’ll take it as it comes.”

Chuck says his is the “classic start-up story.” But in fact it isn’t. The majority of new businesses don’t make it, with more than half closing down before the five-year mark. Like most successful entrepreneurs, Chuck hit hard times. But his vision for the future was crystal clear, and his commitment to making it a reality, though tested many times over more than thirty years, never wavered. Hope kept him moving toward his big, exciting goals, recruited people to his cause, and led to thriving businesses, one built (twice) and successfully launched in the heart of the Great Recession.

I love tales of successful entrepreneurs. They have a special relationship with hope. In fact, people who are in the throes of starting a company have more hope than most, and they put it on the line every day. They depend on their hope and that of others to turn a fledgling idea into a profitable business.

But for a hope researcher, stories have a downside. They can leave the impression that the only support you have for your claims is “anecdotal”—based on unique people and events. So before I share more stories and introduce strategies for increasing hope, I’d like to give you a quick overview of the quantifiable evidence of hope, including facts and figures from business, psychology, and education. If you need to persuade someone that the effects of hope can be measured, this will help you make your case.

Let me start with what I have learned through a statistical examination of more than one hundred hope studies. My colleagues (who include psychologists and educators from around the world) and I have conducted three meta-analyses, which are powerful ways to pull together the results of previous research on how hope relates to academic success, business outcomes, and well-being.
All told, the science of hope shows that how we think about the future is a key determinant of success in school, work, and life. Other conditions being equal, hope leads to a 12 percent gain in academic performance,
a 14 percent bump in workplace outcomes, and a 10 percent happiness boost for hopeful people. To put this in practical terms, a group of typical high-hope students scores a letter grade better on a final exam than their low-hope peers. A group of high-hope salespeople sells as much product in six days as their low-hope colleagues do in seven days. And high-hope people are just plain happier than their low-hope friends.

Specifically, hope is a key driver of five of life’s most desired behaviors and outcomes. I’ll start with the most basic.

“
Eighty percent of success is showing up,” said Woody Allen. Woody’s statistics may be sketchy, but, no question, chronic absenteeism is a sure path to failure at school and work.

Absenteeism is one of the biggest problems facing American schools today. Researchers refer to chronic absence as a canary in the coal mine, an early indicator that students will struggle academically and possibly drop out.
The data show that, by third grade, children who missed too much of kindergarten and first grade fall behind in reading. By sixth grade, missing lots of school increases the likelihood that students will drop out of high school.

Unexcused absences spike when students enter high school, have more freedom, and start to make up their own minds about the value of school in general and of certain subjects in particular. Mike Wortman, the longtime principal of Lincoln High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, confirmed that missing school in the freshman year is one of the best predictors he has that a student will drop out.

That’s why my Gallup colleagues and I took a close look at the school-going behavior of a large group of Principal Wortman’s freshmen.
We measured the hope of students as they entered ninth grade (see Appendix for a description of the hope scales used in the studies referenced throughout this chapter), then we followed them, collecting
attendance data periodically. Students with high hope missed only two days of school during their first school term. Low-hope students missed more than twice as many.

Showing up is not just a problem in schools. American businesses lose $153 billion annually because of employees struggling with chronic health conditions and billions more due to mild illnesses and family emergencies large and small.
Management professor James Avey of Central Washington University believed that employees who are excited about company goals and their own future might miss less work. To test this hypothesis, he led a team that studied hope and absences among more than one hundred mechanical and electrical engineers in a Fortune 100 high-tech firm, a representative sample of the company’s 179,000 workers.

This research really caught my eye because both my brother and brother-in-law are engineers. I couldn’t imagine them buying that hope would have anything to do with showing up for work. I was also eager to learn if hope was associated with cost savings for a company, as Avey put a dollar value on each day of work missed.

Working with the firm’s human resources office, Avey determined that the participants in his study, high hopers and low hopers combined, averaged forty-eight hours, or six full days, of sick time in a given year. (Considering the company’s standard wage of $100 per hour, discounting benefits, and extrapolating to all 179,000 employees, 48 hours of absence per employee would result in a $859 million annual loss to the firm.) However, the more hopeful the engineer, the more likely he was to go to work. Over the course of twelve months, the high-hope engineers missed an average of twenty hours of work, or less than three days of work (not associated with planned leaves or vacations) with many of them missing no time at all. Low-hope engineers missed more than ten days of work each, on average. These employees cost the firm nearly four times as much as their high-hope colleagues in lost productivity due to sick days. No other workplace measure (including job satisfaction, commitment to the company, confidence to do the job)
counted more than hope in determining whether an employee would show up.

Given these findings, Avey suggested that, even for professional-technical jobs that have a long list of educational requirements, including bachelor’s degrees and certifications, recruiters should consider applicants’ hope, along with other positive personal characteristics, in their hiring decisions.

Imagine going to work and finding out that your colleague has left the company and you have to take her place as a project leader.
Your new team is charged with solving a problem that has been hitting the bottom line hard.

Your boss is quick to emphasize the importance of the project and to point out some major obstacles: you have one team member who will undermine your authority; you need more team members but don’t have the resources to hire them; your leadership style differs from that of the former project head; you now report to two supervisors; and you aren’t
completely
clear on which steps to take first, since you get conflicting information from various sources.

What strategies might you use to solve these problems?

Business professor Suzanne Peterson presented this scenario to executives at a top financial services group. She gave each individual two weeks to come up with as many high-quality solutions as possible. Peterson was interested in how hope (which she had measured in each executive before the task began) was associated with the quantity and quality of problem-solving strategies. At the end of the two weeks, she then gave the list of strategies to a panel of their supervisors for evaluation, without identifying which executive submitted each solution. The bosses counted the strategies and rated the quality of each proposed solution. With all the data in hand, Peterson found that the more hopeful executives produced the better solutions. They also submitted many
more solutions, possibly strategically, knowing that some of them would not be viable.

Peterson observes that hope is especially important in organizations experiencing uncertainty due to rapid changes in focus and shifts in leadership: “It may be these settings where employees’ hopefulness can have a greater impact because they require the problem-solving orientation and perseverance of those with higher hope.”
Accordingly, in another study, Peterson found that hope was a more significant predictor of performance in start-up businesses than in more established firms. Why? Peterson put it simply: “[M]ore hopeful employees may be more likely to engage in and accept organizational change efforts.”

This hope-productivity link has been demonstrated in many studies targeting various outcomes, across countries (including China, Portugal, the United States, and Switzerland) and in many professions. Hopeful salespeople reach their quotas more often; hopeful mortgage brokers process and close more loans; and hopeful managing executives meet their quarterly goals more often. To my knowledge, whenever researchers have examined hope and work performance, they have found a meaningful link. Consider, for example,
a study of fast-food outlets. Each of fifty-nine managers of a nationally known fast-food chain was ranked from low to high in hope on a self-reported hope scale. With the help of the corporate office (which did not know the managers’ hope scores), the researchers paired data on each franchise’s overall profitability with the manager’s hope level. The highest-hope managers recorded more profits than the lowest-hope managers. The same trend held for employee turnover, a crucial metric for any service industry.

It seems likely that this hope-productivity link is established when people are still in school.
Indeed, research has examined the role of hope in predicting the performance of elementary, middle school, high school, and college students. In each study, hope predicted test scores and term GPA when controlling for previous grades, intelligence, and
other psychological variables (like engagement, optimism, and self-efficacy).