Welcome to 2025! Today, I want to talk about HOPE.

People say “hope is NOT a strategy”, and that’s true. BUT, it’s a huge PART of a strategy.

This week, many of us are setting goals and strategizing for the 2025 year. Here’s WHY it’s incredibly important that HOPE is part of those plans.

In the 1950’s, Harvard-educated and Johns Hopkins-based researcher Curt Richter did an experiment on rats. While animal testing can be considered cruel and sad, this experiment produced some incredible findings.

Richter found that with NO interference, rats could swim about 15 minutes before they gave up and drowned.

Then, with a second group of rats, Richter did something different. Right before the rats reached their 15-minute limit, he pulled them out, dried them off, and gave them a short break before placing them back in the water.

The rats that had been given this brief break then went on to swim for:

WAIT FOR IT…..

60 HOURS!!! 240X as long as the first set of rats.

Why? It’s simple. They had been given HOPE.

The act of them having been saved (even if only briefly) showed them that it was POSSIBLE they’d be saved again. After all, they’d already seen it happen once. So they simply BELIEVED that it could happen again.

Nothing in the rats’ BODIES limited them from swimming for 60 hours. The only limitation in the first group of rats were their BRAINS. When the rats simply choose to believe that they could swim longer- they DID.

This reminds me of my favorite Henry Ford quote: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t- either way, you’re right.”

If you want to do something (ANYTHING), it’s IMPERATIVE that you believe you can AND will. You MUST have HOPE. Otherwise, it’ll never happen.

Whatever you want to achieve in 2025 is going to require that you have hope, faith, belief (whatever you want to call it) that you can AND will achieve it. If you don’t, then you can kiss your goals and plans goodbye.