Cultivating Hope and Optimism in the New Year

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Given the considerable challenges we face currently and unknown ones that may arise during 2024, practical messages of hope and optimism are needed now more than ever.

In these early weeks and throughout the year, let’s tap into the guidance of Peter Drucker, “the father of modern management,” and especially his work on how to approach and think about the future, as a beacon for a successful new year.

In the face of maximum uncertainty, we can look through a positive lens and apply adaptability, flexibility, ingenuity, and resilience. This means emphasizing new beginnings, future-focused thinking, and positive change. Drucker taught that change should be viewed as an opportunity rather than as a threat.

He believed that the future was created day to day, minute to minute. The result is that sources of hope and optimism are happening all around us, as people create new works of art, new organizations are formed, and scientific and medical breakthroughs are achieved.

Drucker’s forward-focused mindset advocated intentionality and seeking out areas in which you can do good and make a difference, for yourself and others. As the year begins, students and faculty are beginning new semesters, entrepreneurs are starting new ventures, while other people are changing jobs, creating new products and services, and searching for different ways to live, learn, and work. All can be improved through optimistic and hopeful attitudes.

Solid Strategies and Positive Aspirations

Choose to stay hopeful and optimistic, even in the face of rejection and disappointment. This requires solid strategies and positive aspirations. Get going by planning for new ways of working and learning and new uses for leisure time. Take practical steps like getting involved in a worthy cause or registering for new courses, workshops, seminars, or conferences, either in your current fields or ones you are investigating.

Drucker advocated focusing on what you can do, rather than what you can’t, and focusing on opportunities rather than problems. It’s a valuable way of looking at the personal agency required to get things done, improve our lives, and ideally the lives of other people.

In our personal agency, we remain realistic about our current reality, yet focus on the future by sloughing off yesterday, while still learning lessons from the past. As Drucker pointed out in 1993’s Managing for the Future, “To get at the new and better, you have to throw out the old, outworn, obsolete, no longer productive, as well as the mistakes, failure, and misdirections of effort of the past.” We should be action-oriented, with action aimed at creating positive results for the future, whether for individuals or organizations.

Self-Efficacy

The focus on personal agency and maintaining a sense of accomplishment recalls the seminal work on self-efficacy of Stanford University’s Albert Bandura, one of the world’s most cited and renowned psychologists/researchers, who died in late 2021. I’ve long considered him to be a Drucker-like figure, both in professional stature and influence in multiple domains. Like Drucker, he was also born outside the United States, based in California, and died at the age of 95.

In an entry Bandura wrote for the Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, he describes self-efficacy in this way: “Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with people’s beliefs in their ability to influence events that affect their lives. This core belief is the foundation of human motivation, performance accomplishments, and emotional well-being.”

Affirming Hope

Drucker considered his 1949 essay “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” about the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), one of the best things he ever wrote. In his 1993 book, The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition, Drucker reported that "The Unfashionable Kierkegaard" was written "as an affirmation of the existential, the spiritual, the individual dimension of the Creature. It was written to assert that society is not enough—not even for society. It was written to affirm hope.”