A failed rescue mission still kept hundreds of prisoners alive for years

It's tempting to treat hope as a pleasant feeling you either have or don't, something closer to optimism or luck than to anything you can actually build. Admiral William H. McRaven's own experience argues against that. In 2011, while serving in Afghanistan, he was told by video call that a bone marrow biopsy had found chronic lymphocytic leukemia in his spleen, and that his military career was likely over. He flew home braced for the worst. Then he sat across from a specialist, Dr. Michael Keating, who walked in, demanded a hug, told McRaven's wife she could stop looking for a new boyfriend, and calmly explained that newer treatments meant the spleen removal and immediate chemotherapy McRaven had been told to expect weren't necessary at all. McRaven asked if he could go back to Afghanistan. Sure, Keating said. Just try not to get shot.

McRaven's diagnosis hadn't changed in that room. What changed was his sense of what tomorrow might hold, and he says that shift let him keep working for years afterward instead of spending them consumed by fear.

He draws a similar lesson from a very different story: a 1970 Green Beret raid deep into North Vietnam to rescue American POWs from a camp called Son Tay. The camp turned out to be empty, the prisoners moved months earlier, and the raid looked like a total failure. It wasn't until the POWs came home in 1973 that anyone learned what the raid had actually done. We knew we hadn't been forgotten, one of them said. The attempt itself, not its success, was what had kept hundreds of imprisoned men believing they could survive.

McRaven's point is that hope is not a mood, it's a specific belief that tomorrow will be better than today, and that belief only holds up if it's backed by someone credible enough to make it plausible. That means hope isn't only something you receive. He argues each person has some particular skill, steadiness, or knowledge that someone else currently lacks, and giving that thing to another person, deliberately, is what actually makes their tomorrow more believable.

Think of one person in your life right now who is bracing for a bad outcome, and identify the one specific thing you are genuinely good at, whether it's staying calm under pressure, explaining complicated information simply, or just showing up reliably, that could make their tomorrow feel more believable to them. Offer that specific thing directly this week rather than a vague reassurance, the way a doctor's plain explanation or a failed rescue attempt still gave people something concrete to hold onto. Keep your promise small enough that you can actually deliver on it, since hope collapses fast once it's shown to be empty. Then check back with that person again, more than once, because hope tends to need renewing rather than delivering just the one time.