Hope Springs External

In September of 1994, Castle Rock Entertainment released “The Shawshank Redemption,” a movie based on Stephen King’s short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” Frank Darabont wrote the screenplay, and the film received many incredible reviews. Yet, few actually went to the theatre to see it. With a modest $28M dollar budget, it made just $16M in its first theatre run, giving the producers major concerns about recouping their investments.

Movies about prisons typically are not major attractions, and this one didn’t have any female roles, likely contributing to the lack of initial interest. Furthermore, the title was confusing.

But eventually, the most powerful marketing tool of all took over: Word of mouth. “The Shawshank Redemption” became incredibly popular and remains a must-watch movie to this day. The film is not about the prison system, or about wrongful crimes, or even about forging unique friendships. The movie is all about HOPE. Hope sells, hope is essential and, most of all, as the film boasts: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good things ever die.”

We need to remind ourselves of that line from the movie as self-quarantining and social distancing guidelines have been extended to April 30th in the United States. When you first heard those words, what was your initial reaction? Many said, “This is hard. This is going to be a challenge.” And if you uttered those words, you weren’t wrong. It will be a challenge, it will be hard, it will be taxing on our relationships, and it will cause us to lose our patience over the littlest thing.

In the movie, it was hard for Andy Dufresne to be sentenced to two life sentences for murders he didn’t commit. It was hard to watch time pass sitting in a cell with no end in sight. But he never gave up hope. He never allowed the magnitude of the days to affect the current day. Dufresne stayed busy living, not worrying about tomorrow or pondering how much more could he endure.

We will never give up hope. We will never allow the days of isolation to stop us from becoming the best possible version of ourselves. We don’t have 30 more days of separation; we have only one more. In these hard times, we must train our minds to be present, to not worry about the near future or the lack of light at the end of the tunnel. We can only allow our endearing hope, our great faith, and, most of all, our compassion to guide us one single day at a time.

As for the film, after Dufresne escapes from prison and heads south to Zihuatanejo, he leaves a note for his buddy, Red, under an oak tree, assuming Red will one day gain his release. That oak tree became a symbol of hope for all. The story has been timeless; those actors, regardless of other marquee roles, are still stopped on the street for their work in Shawshank.

The movie proves hope sells, hope works, and when touched with hope, we can overcome anything.

P.S. If you are in search of a book recommendation, our team at The Daily Coach highly recommends Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality by Hector Macdonald. The book explores how truth is used and abused in politics, business, the media, and everyday life. Macdonald shows how a clearer understanding of truth's many faces renders us better able to navigate our world and more influential within it.

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