Human spirit

Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as 'A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"

Simply looking at statistics or numbers can tell you a lot about things, but in all honesty, they can never tell you the whole story. If they did there would be very little uncertainty in life. The better sports team would always win. The stock market would always react the same way to inputs. People who lived healthy life styles would avoid serious illness.

However, we know that the ability to predict the future based on statistics is limited. Those who like numbers always feel that had they had better data, they could have gotten it right. Maybe, but the amount of variability due to individual behavior is too hard to predict.

The value of each individual is the greatest variable of all. People don't look at statistics and decide they might as well not try because the numbers are against them. They react in many ways, and in ways that the statistics simply can't predict.

One of the major factors that impact this reaction is the degree of hope in the future people have. People tend to be optimistic generally. There has been a tremendous amount of doom and gloom in the media over the last year and yet most people are still optimistic about the future. Yes, they have seen retirement funds collapse, they have seen home prices drop, but while some have been so battered that they have given in to despair, most have not.

So, what is the value of human spirit? Cynics discount it but that is a mistake. The world as we know it is the result of the accumulated human spirit of everyone who has ever lived. The world will continue to progress because of human spirit.

Human spirit causes us to overcome challenges, find solutions, and simply succeed.