I backed a project last year that everyone said would fail. They had good reasons. The timeline was absurd, the budget was thin, half the people involved were actively hostile. A reasonable person would have walked away.
I am not always reasonable.
The project worked. Not perfectly, nothing does, but well enough to matter. And as I watched it come together, I realized I would rather be wrong sometimes than right from the sidelines. I would rather look foolish for believing something could work than look smart for predicting it would not.
I call this ruthless optimism. It is easier to be cynical. Cynicism is safe: it inoculates you against disappointment. If you assume everything will fail, you are never wrong. You get to be the smartest person in the room, the one who saw it coming, the one who knew better all along. Cynicism asks nothing of you except the willingness to watch from the sidelines.
But cynicism does not build anything.
I have spent the last decade working on the energy transition. I have sat in rooms where the problems felt insurmountable. Grid instability. Workforce displacement. Political headwinds. Cost curves that would not bend fast enough. I have watched projects fail. I have watched good people burn out. I have made decisions that kept me up at night wondering if I had gotten it catastrophically wrong.
And still, I choose to believe we can build a clean energy economy that works for everyone. Not because I am naive about the obstacles, but because I have seen what is possible when people have purpose. And I have seen the alternative.
The Seduction of Cynicism
Here’s what I’ve noticed about cynicism: it spreads. One person’s knowing shrug becomes another person’s excuse not to try. A culture of low expectations creates the very failures it predicted.
I’ve watched this happen in organizations. Someone new comes in with energy, with ideas, with the audacity to think things could be different. And the veterans, the ones who’ve “seen it all,” smile that tired smile. Give it time, they say. You’ll learn. And sometimes the new person does learn. They learn to stop trying. They learn that hope is embarrassing.
This is how institutions decay. Not through dramatic collapse, but through a thousand small surrenders. Through the accumulation of people who stopped believing their effort mattered.
The cynics will tell you they’re just being realistic. They’ll point to the failures, the setbacks, the politicians who sold out, the corporations that prioritized quarterly earnings over long-term survival. And they’re not wrong about any of it. The failures are real. The obstacles are real. The disappointments stack up.
But cynicism doesn’t actually protect you from any of that. It just makes sure you don’t accomplish anything while you’re being disappointed.
What Despair Does at Scale
People need to believe their effort matters. Take that away, and you don’t just get disengagement. You get despair. And despair, at scale, is dangerous.
The historians among us know what happens when large populations lose hope. The grievances that fueled revolutions, French, Arab Spring, and countless others, weren’t primarily about ideology. They were about dignity. They were about people who felt invisible, expendable, forgotten by systems that were supposed to serve them.
We’re living through a version of this now. Not because people are suffering more than they ever have. By most material measures, life has improved dramatically over the past century. But material progress doesn’t mean much if people can’t see their place in it. If they can’t see a future worth working toward. If they feel like pawns in someone else’s game.
This is why the energy transition matters so much, and why getting it wrong terrifies me more than climate change itself. Because if we build a clean energy future that leaves half the workforce behind, if we tell coal miners and refinery workers and utility employees that their skills are obsolete and their communities don’t matter, we won’t just have an economic problem. We’ll have a political one. We’ll have a social fabric problem. We’ll have millions of people with nothing to lose and every reason to burn it all down.
Despair doesn’t make people passive. It makes them destructive. Including self-destructive. The opioid crisis, the “deaths of despair” that economists track through mortality data, the rise of political movements built on grievance and resentment: these aren’t separate phenomena. They’re what happens when people stop believing in a future that includes them.
The Three Things That Matter
Over the years, I’ve developed a simple framework for thinking about what people need. Not what corporations need, not what the climate needs, not what abstract systems require. What actual human beings need to show up and do hard things over long periods of time.
It comes down to three questions.
Purpose: Do people understand why their work matters?
This sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how often organizations fail at it. They assume the purpose is self-evident. They assume people can connect the dots between their daily tasks and some larger mission. They can’t, or at least, they won’t do it automatically.
Purpose has to be articulated. Repeatedly. Concretely. Not in the form of mission statements that nobody reads, but in the regular rhythm of how work gets done. Why this project? Why this deadline? Why does it matter if we get this right?
When I worked at Power TakeOff, we were building software to reduce energy waste in commercial buildings. Important work, but easy to lose sight of when you’re debugging code or arguing about API specifications. The teams that worked best were the ones where someone, anyone, kept connecting the work back to the buildings, the kilowatt-hours, the emissions. The ones where the purpose stayed alive in the conversation.
Meaning: Can people connect their daily tasks to larger outcomes?
Purpose is the “why.” Meaning is the “how it adds up.” People need to see their piece fitting into something bigger. They need to understand the chain of causation between what they do on a Tuesday afternoon and what changes in the world.
This is harder than it sounds. Modern work is fragmented. Specialized. Abstract. A grid operator flipping switches doesn’t see the family that keeps the lights on. A policy analyst writing memos doesn’t see the factory that eventually gets built. The feedback loops are long and indirect.
Good leaders build those connections deliberately. They tell stories. They show outcomes. They bring customers into the room. They find ways to make the abstractions concrete.
Dignity: Are people treated as essential, not expendable?
This is the one that gets forgotten. You can have all the purpose and meaning in the world, but if people feel like interchangeable parts, like inputs to be optimized, like costs to be minimized, none of it matters.
Dignity means being seen. It means having voice. It means knowing that if you disappeared tomorrow, someone would notice, and not just because there’s a gap in the org chart.
The energy transition is going to test this. Hard. Because the economic logic of the transition, the logic of efficiency and automation and new skills for new industries, doesn’t have dignity built into it. That’s something we have to add. Deliberately. Stubbornly. Even when it’s expensive. Even when it slows things down.
Get these three things right, and people will run through walls for you. Get them wrong, and no amount of technology, training, or transition funding will save you.
The Honest Answer
After the cliff fall, people ask how I stayed motivated. How I kept going through the recovery, the surgeries, the physical therapy that seemed to go on forever.
The honest answer is that I didn’t always. There were days when despair was closer than hope.
I’ve rebuilt multiple times in my life. The cliff was the most dramatic, but not the only one. I went back to learn math at 25, starting from scratch after convincing myself for years that I wasn’t a “math person.” I stayed at Power TakeOff two years longer than I wanted to because the programs I’d designed were saving small businesses and schools over $10 million in utility costs, and I wasn’t going to let that fall apart when I left. I trained my replacement. I documented everything. I made sure the methodology would survive without me. Then I left, not because I quit, but because the work was done.
Each time felt like starting over. Each time came with the voice in my head saying: what’s the point? Why try again when you know how hard it’s going to be?
The answer, for me, is always the same. Not a philosophical answer. A practical one.
What else am I going to do?
Cynicism might protect you from disappointment, but it also guarantees nothing gets better. Despair might feel justified, but it doesn’t solve problems. The only posture that actually changes anything is the one that says: this might not work, and I’m going to try anyway.
That’s what I mean by ruthless optimism. It’s not blind optimism. It’s not naive optimism. It’s optimism that sees the obstacles clearly and chooses to act anyway. Because the alternative is guaranteed failure, and that’s not a bet I’m willing to make.
Why I Choose to Believe
The energy transition is going to be hard. Harder than most people realize. The technical challenges are the easy part. The human challenges, the political challenges, the challenges of bringing millions of people along on a journey that threatens everything they know: those are the ones that keep me up at night.
And yet.
I’ve seen what’s possible when people have purpose. I’ve watched teams do impossible things because they believed it mattered. I’ve seen communities transform when someone finally took them seriously. I’ve seen individuals rebuild themselves from rubble, including in the mirror.
I choose to believe we can do this. Not because the evidence is overwhelming. Not because success is guaranteed. But because the attempt itself is meaningful. Because the alternative is unacceptable. Because hope, even ruthless hope, is the only thing that has ever built anything worth building.
The cynics are watching from the sidelines, waiting to be proven right. Let them wait.
The rest of us have work to do.