A colleague of mine, Prof Nick Barker, has spent a lifetime investigating leadership and leaders. He believes that the best leaders are those who are “brokers of hope”.
At the risk of reducing his life’s work to a single phrase, the definition of hope that I love the most is: “being inspired to do the right thing, even when the outcome is uncertain.”
In other words, we choose to hope (and believe) that the path we are on right now is the right one, and we act with the best interests of our community in mind, even if we are not sure how it will all work out. Another way to frame this is to say: do the best you can with what you know now.
As our Covid-19 Lockdown begins, I choose to hope. I choose to believe that with all we know now, this is the right way to beat this disease, and that if we stay locked down we will beat this thing.
I choose hope.