Today was a series of conversations with patient care teams as passionate as you can imagine about improving the patient’s experience in the hospital. These are the “A” players who made it obvious that investing in the strengths of A players yields more returns than those of the “C” players so many managers tend to over-focus on. It was yet another vivid reminder of the strengths-based mantra (heavily supported by the research) that more improvements and innovations happen when we invest in our areas of strength than in the areas of our weaknesses.

Hope lives alone at the edge of the village, quietly co-existing with good and evil. On its best days hope inspires its child perseverance; on its worst days hope excuses its child inaction. Hope is cordial in an arms length way with its neighbor fear. Hope’s secret is to one day become more like its neighbor, dreaming.

Impatience is obsessed with what it doesn’t have at the moment. It feels entitled to more, believes it deserves more. It is insulted by the tempo of reality as it is even though it knows that no action can hurry the natural flow of things.

Patience is busy doing what can be done. Patience doesn’t wait because it’s too engaged in taking the open road instead of standing in opposition to the road closed. Patience isn’t burdened by the constraints of entitlement, nor victimized by the tempo of reality, content to ride whatever wave presenting itself to the shore of possibility.

After working with dozens of health care staff today, it’s more apparent than ever that people want to be challenged. They want to be engaged in new ways. This is why people go into professions like the arts, sciences, law, engineering, and technologies. The quickest way to compliment someone is to treat them as capable of more. High expectations are the truest indicators of respect.

In the land of love, abundance is the starting point, not the destination.

As of today, there are 6,664,140,646 people on this planet, and that many definitions of what it means to succeed. Each of us has a sense of what it means to thrive in context. The responsibility to define success is our own. None of the other 6,664,140,645 people can decide for us.

Perhaps the only thing more important are our collective definitions of success.

If it was about us, it would be different.

Did the keynote today at a conference of health care leaders in college and university health centers, as usual sans death by powerpoint. In a side conversation, I’m told that one of the current trends is hypochondriacal students with web-based fears that every minor skin and mucus variation is a sure sign of an impending catastrophic illness. In my day, the mid-night walk to the library for medical encyclopedias were assessed with costs exceeding gains. Few of us interpreted this lethargy as a death wish, only as a fine rationalization for the 3-day rule: if it doesn’t get worse, spread, or cause a major limb to shrivel and fall off, it probably wasn’t anything anyway. Empirical medicine at its best.

Did a workshop today with health care staff and leaders on the use of humor and storytelling in patient care. Amidst a sea of ah-ha’s, people were amazed at the relationship between the structure of stories and their power. They also got that we have become a culture whose storytelling illiteracy is epidemic. No thanks to the so-called “stories” (they are not) of media news, we have now confused the distinction between facts and stories. A string of facts has functionally nothing in common with a story, starting with how it engages others as co-creators of meaning provoked by the story.

Storytelling is a lost art, but retains its power over facts in shaping individual and collective transformation. We are right to have little faith in the power of facts and more faith in the power of stories.

The measure of our life is not marked by what’s passed, but rather by what’s possible. There is nothing more important than the way we determine the value and worth of our life. What do you think is the value and worth of your life, and do you present your life accordingly?

There are myriad ways of denying our capacity for gratitude, including maintaining a passive victim attitude, a sense of entitlement, a preoccupation with materialism, a lack of self-reflection on our good fortune, simply taking things for granted, and self-centeredness.

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer