Hope through Options

Years ago I was privileged to spend a couple of hours with Dick Bolles, who has since passed away. You can read about that lunch meeting here, but I wanted to highlight a massively important message I got from Dick. In my own words he said something like this:

When you have no options you have no HOPE.?Show people their options and you can see their HOPE.

Dick said that the presentation he just saw me deliver was a message of hope. I showed people they had options, which meant I was spreading hope.

I was grateful for this insight into the message I had shared hundreds of times. I didn't know how to frame it well but Dick showed me how.

One of my favorite newsletters to read on hope is by Joe DiDonato, who is writing about side hustles. You can see the 13-and-counting newsletters and subscribe here. He talks about making money on the side with t-shirt design, copywriting, speaking, and more. I'm excited to see what he comes up with.

He is showing you options. When you believe you have options, you increase your hope.

One of the reasons I've invested so much time into creating JibberJobber, a job search CRM, is that I want job seekers to pull themselves out of a dark, hopeless place and at least feel like they have some decent tools (instead of a self-made spreadsheet or a spiral notebook). You have the option of using better tools in your job search.

I've also invested a massive amount of time in Pluralsight because I want to show people they can communicate better. They can improve their personal and professional relationships. They can do better, have more, accomplish, and actually have job satisfaction and happiness. I do this by showing how to improve their soft skills (my courses are here) and encouraging continuing education.

I invested in Snowfly because I love how they are strengthening organizational cultures by providing employee and peer recognition systems, employee rewards, engagement programs, etc. We help employers give options to their employees in various ways but perhaps the most important is the option of working in a much better work environment. I've worked with people who were hopeless because they thought all jobs had to be miserable. Not true, not true at all.

Are you hopeless? I know the feeling. It's dark and lonely (even though there are a bunch of people there).

The very second I found hope was when I started creating options. When I figured out I could switch from "I'm in a job search" to "I'm going to create my own next thing!" was when I went from hopeless to hopeful, and everything changed.

Create your own options. Be open to them, as weird as they might sound. As I've said before, no one goes to college to learn to be a dog walker, but some dog walkers are making bank. Sometimes we have to let our ego or plans go. Other times we have to ask "what if," even "what if I failed?"

Don't depend on your boss or employer or industry or the media to give you hope. Take charge, be creative, and try things out. Maybe you can find something much better in a non-traditional career path.