Feel free to blame the seven year old

My grandparents built a house in a small Italian village. My grandfather worked as a waiter in London, my grandmother as a seamstress. I was lucky enough to spend most summers of my childhood in that house.

One of those summers, after riding my bike up and down the driveway on training wheels, I decided it was time to take them off. I got a hammer and did it myself. Then I spent a lot of time picking myself up off the ground learning to ride again.

Eventually I could. And once I got bored of the driveway, I asked my grandmother if I could take the bike out and explore the village.

She said no. My parents weren’t there, the roads weren’t safe, she was responsible for me. She said it with complete love and complete firmness, the way she said most things.

I got so mad I tried to puncture one of the tires on my bike with a nail. (Which is not that easy, it turns out.)

Feel free to judge. I did for a long time—especially with the help of regular reminders at family dinners.

But the reason I did it wasn’t just anger. My hope had been taken. Not cruelly—by someone who loved me, for reasons that made complete sense from where she was standing. But her intent and the consequence were different. She intended to protect me. What I experienced was the loss of the goal, the path, and any sense that I could do anything about either.

The nail was the only agency I had left, so I used it.

I still recognize that impulse in myself as an adult. I do not go around puncturing tires, in case you were wondering.

⸻

Hope is not optimism.

Optimism is a general sense that things will probably be fine. Hope is more specific than that. Research in positive psychology frames it as a cognitive structure with three components: goal, pathway, and agency.

You need a goal—something real, not just vaguely desirable.

You need a path—a visible way to get from here to there, even if you can only see the next step.

And you need agency—the belief that what you do actually affects how it turns out.

Take any one of those away and hope collapses.

A goal without a path is a wish. A path without a goal is a walk with nowhere to go. Agency without either is just motion.

That summer morning I had all three. The village was the goal. The bike was the path. And I had taken the training wheels off myself, which meant I believed I could do it.

Then my grandmother said no, and all three disappeared at once.

⸻

I am a Chelsea supporter.

Every season, I start by believing this will be the year. The mounting evidence against this position has done nothing to change my optimism at the start.

But at some point, it becomes clear they’re not going to win the league. And something shifts. I don’t stop watching. I just stop watching all of it. I get selective. I tune in for the games I think they can win.

If you follow any team that has repeatedly broken your heart, you know exactly what I mean. The moment the season stops feeling possible is the moment you start doing other things on a Saturday afternoon.

You’re still a fan. You just stopped being a hopeful one.

⸻

Work is no different.

Most people start a new job the way I start a Chelsea season—with a genuine belief that this time it will be different. That the goal is clear, the path makes sense, and what they do will actually matter.

Nobody loses hope at work in a single moment. It happens slowly, in accumulation.

The initiative that launches with a slide and no explanation. The strategy that quietly changes, but nobody says it out loud. The role that turns out to have less room in it than the job description suggested. The meeting where everyone nods and nothing happens.

People don’t dramatically change when this happens. They still show up. They still laugh. They still grab coffee.

But it shows up in smaller ways.

“Oh, this place.” “Here we go again.”

Said like a joke. Not really a joke.

⸻

Leaders feel it too.

Not always from failed initiatives, but from decisions made somewhere else. The strategy that arrives fully formed from a room they weren’t in. The budget cut without a conversation. The reorganization announced on a Tuesday that changes everything about their team.

The goal moves. The path disappears. The sense that what they do matters gets harder to hold onto.

And then someone says, “here we go again,” and they don’t fully disagree.

⸻

When this happens repeatedly, something more important than morale goes.

Energy.

Not the visible kind that shows up in dashboards. The discretionary kind. The extra hour. The idea that didn’t have to be offered. The willingness to try something that might not work.

Organizations are very good at measuring output—velocity, utilization, engagement scores that get discussed in meetings and filed somewhere.

None of that tells you whether people still believe in what they’re doing.

None of it tells you whether hope is still intact.

We have the same blind spot with risk. The status report says green. The register says managed. And somewhere a project is twelve points off the top of the table, everyone knows it, and nobody says it out loud.

You cannot manage what you cannot see. And we’ve built very good systems for missing the things that matter most.

⸻

So here’s the question.

When was the last time you felt all three— a goal that mattered, a path you could see, and the sense that what you did changed how it went?

And when did you last feel one of them go?

What did you reach for when it did? (Preferably not nails.)

Then look around you.

Who has stopped offering ideas they don’t have to offer? Who laughs at everything except the work? Who says “here we go again” just often enough that it has stopped being funny?

And if you lead people, ask yourself one thing:

Do the people you lead know what they’re trying to do, can they see how to get there, and do they believe that what they do matters?

If the answer to any of those is no—or even “I’m not sure”—that’s the work.

Not motivation. Not morale.

Restoring a clear goal, a visible path, and the belief that what people do actually matters.

Because without those, people don’t quit.

They just stop trying.

⸻

If this resonated, the work of psychologist C.R. Snyder on hope theory is worth your time. His book The Psychology of Hope is where the goals, pathway, and agency framework comes from. Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead picks up from there in the context of leadership and what it costs people when hope is absent at work.