Hope. It’s such a small word, but at times, it seems like an overwhelmingly large concept. Something distant, like the moon, so far away that it looks small. But then, humans have landed on the moon, haven’t they?

Hope isn’t a distant object in the cosmos. It’s all around you if you look closely. It’s within you if you let the hope you feel and see fill you up until you are hope full—full of hope.

The question is, do you choose to be full of hope or full of doubt?

Doubt wants you to believe you aren’t worth achieving your goals and dreams; that you don’t have what it takes or you shouldn’t bother trying because you’ll only fail anyway. It wants you to think that your goals aren’t worth the struggle that comes with them.

Do not listen to that doubt! It doesn’t know what it’s talking about anyway.

The last 15 steps (or lack of steps) don’t matter because that’s in the past. You can’t change anything that happened during those steps. If you haven’t even started yet, you can’t go back and start earlier. Those moments are gone, and you can’t get them back.

The next 15 steps aren’t that important yet, either. So many things could change between now and then. The future is built from the actions you are taking right now, so predicting what steps come after this isn’t very helpful. You can plan what you think is going to happen, but you won’t actually know until you’ve put in the work to get there, so why borrow trouble early?

Instead of ruminating on the past or trying to predict the future, you should be focusing on the one thing you can control: the next step.