The hope-spreader

Above all you see the possibility first. However bad it gets — “maybe there's water past that hill,” “that ship could come back” — you open the next door. Drop that one line into a tired, heavy camp and somehow everyone rises again. This optimism that pushes despair back, and the power to imagine a path that isn't there, are resources as vital in a shipwreck as supplies.

Your strength is giving people a reason to try again. You're one of the few who can say “let's do it differently this time” and mean it, right at the spot of a failure. But you can't stay put in one place. When a new possibility appears you leave yesterday's well and go toward it. Half-done tasks pile up while the dull thing needed today keeps getting pushed back. Your heart's always on tomorrow, your hands always on the new. While possibilities stay open you're happier than anyone alive, but the moment you have to narrow them to one and push it to the end, the energy suddenly drains out of you.

So where you break is the moment that needs grit. One well dug to the bottom gives water, more than ten possibilities left open. This type starts better than anyone, but the starts scatter without reaching completion. What you need is to tie the imagining to one thing today. Keep the gift for spreading hope — just fasten some of that energy to the single thing in front of you.