Why “Pictures” Works

I chose this keyword intuitively. The research explains why it was exactly right.

A few weeks into my 2025 health journey, I needed something I didn’t have a name for yet.

The inner critic was loud in those early mornings. Not dramatically loud — just persistently, quietly loud. Stay in bed. You’re tired. One day won’t matter. I needed something that cuts through that noise in seconds. Not a motivational poster. Not a complicated system. One word, accessible instantly, that resets me before the critic won.

I landed on Pictures.

The story behind that keyword is simple. I have a lot of life still ahead — weddings, retirement, our kids starting to build families of their own. Every one of those moments will be inevitably captured in photographs that will outlive me. What will my kids tell their grandchildren when they look at those pictures? What story will my presence — or absence, or health — tell across generations?

That’s the keyword. That’s why it works.

Or so I thought. What I’ve discovered since is that the research had already explained it — long before I stumbled onto it. Four different bodies of work, from four different researchers, all pointing at the same thing from different angles.

What C.R. Snyder Found

Psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades studying hope and concluded it has two engines. The first is agency — the belief that you can move forward. The second is pathways — the ability to find or create a route when the obvious one is blocked.

Neither of those is passive. Both require action. Hope, in Snyder’s framework, is not a mood. It’s a cognitive skill — something you practice, not something that visits you.

“Pictures” serves both engines simultaneously. It activates agency. I have a reason to move. It opens a pathway. This is what I’m moving toward. When the inner critic chooses comfort and prompts me to stay in bed, the word reconnects me to my will. It provides direction. In under a second.

What Dr. Michael Gervais Discovered

High-performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais has worked with Olympians, NFL teams, and world-class performers of every kind. He teaches that an effective personal philosophy needs to meet three criteria. It must be 25 words or less, shorter is better. It must be speakable under duress. When you speak of it with others, you must feel it somewhere in your body. There is an activation, a physical response. You experience a release of something real.

“Pictures” passes all three. It’s one word. It’s speakable at 5 am when I’m half asleep and the critic is winning. And when I talk about what it means — the photographs, the grandchildren, the legacy — I feel it. Not as a metaphor. As a genuine physical response.

That third criterion is not poetic language. It’s neuroscience. Which brings me to the next researcher.

What Agile Best Self Principle 8 Adds

Here’s where things get a little circular in the best possible way.

Gervais’s work on personal philosophy covers the three criteria. It emphasizes the importance of feeling it in your body. This work influenced the development of Agile Best Self Principle 8. My co-creator Michaele Gardner and I arrived at this principle through our own work building the framework. Principle 8 states: prioritize being more over doing more.

It’s my favorite principle. It sounds simple. It isn’t.

Most of us organize our lives around doing. Goals, metrics, outputs, achievements. We measure progress by what we accomplish. There’s nothing wrong with that — but it misses something foundational. Before you can sustain the doing, you have to settle the question of being. Who are you becoming? What person is making these choices? If you don’t have a clear answer to those questions, the doing eventually runs out of fuel.

“Pictures” is a being word, not a doing word. It doesn’t say run more miles or hit a number on the scale. It says become the person whose grandchildren will know who he was. That’s an identity, not a task. And identity, it turns out, is far more durable than motivation.

James Clear makes a similar argument in Atomic Habits. He suggests that the most effective habit change starts with identity rather than outcomes. You don’t set a goal to lose weight. You decide you are a healthy person, and then you act accordingly. “Pictures” does exactly that. It’s Principle 8 compressed into one word. It is a daily declaration of being over doing. This declaration is made accessible in under a second at 5 am when the inner critic is loudest.

Gervais’s thinking helped shape Principle 8. Principle 8 helped shape the keyword. The keyword is now validated by Gervais’s own criteria. That loop matters to me. It means the framework is coherent. The pieces weren’t assembled randomly. They point at the same truth from different angles.

What Dr. Sanjay Gupta Confirmed

In his research on brain health, neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, in his book Keep Sharp, documents how the brain responds to meaningful purpose. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, and social connection all contribute to cognitive resilience — but so does having a reason that matters. Purpose activates the brain differently than obligation does. The physical sensation Gervais describes when you speak your keyword with conviction signals a release. Your brain releases the neurochemistry of meaning.

“Pictures” isn’t just a memory aid. Every time it works, it’s also a small act of brain training. Reaching for the keyword, feeling the activation, choosing to get up anyway — that’s the practice at the biological level.

What Dr. Jane McGonigal Proved

This is the one that surprised me most. Future forecaster and game designer Dr. Jane McGonigal, in her book Imaginable, draws on neuroscience research showing something counter-intuitive. When you imagine your future self, your brain treats that person as a stranger. Literally. MRI studies show the neural patterns are similar to imagining someone you’ve never met.

This is why it’s so easy to make decisions today that harm the person you’ll be tomorrow. Your future self doesn’t feel real enough to protect.

McGonigal calls the solution Episodic Future Thinking — the practice of mentally simulating specific future experiences in vivid, sensory detail. Not “I want to be healthy someday.” Something concrete: a room, a face, a moment, a feeling. The more specific and vivid the simulation, the more real your future self becomes. As a result, your present-day decisions shift in that direction.

“Pictures” is a personal future simulation compressed into a single word. When I say it, I’m not thinking abstractly about health. I’m seeing specific photographs. Specific faces. Specific moments that matter. My future self stops being a stranger and becomes someone worth getting out of bed for.

McGonigal found this in her research. I found it at 5 am without knowing her name.

What This Means for You

I’m not sharing the research to make this feel academic. I’m sharing it because I think it changes what you look for in a keyword.

If you’ve tried to use a motivational phrase before and found it faded after a few weeks, there’s a reason. The phrase did not pass Gervais’s three criteria, or it did not activate a genuine physical response. It most likely it was a goal — something to achieve — rather than a simulation — someone to become.

The research points toward the same thing from four directions. The keyword that holds is the one connected to a vivid, specific future moment. This moment involves people you love and a version of yourself worth becoming. It has to be real enough to feel. It has to be short enough to access instantly. It has to survive your worst morning.

I got a reminder of this just a couple of days ago.

I had just finished my first strength training session after minor surgery. There were three weeks of restrictions. It was a procedure I’m glad is behind me, and a morning that was more emotional than I expected. There’s something about getting back in the weight room after being kept away from it. I was sitting with that feeling, somewhere between relief and gratitude and something harder to name, when my phone buzzed.

A text from a good friend arrived. He is a recently retired corporate fitness executive. He has been one of my biggest supporters on this journey. He understands both the physical and the mindset dimensions of what I’ve been building. A photograph. Me, two years ago, on a guys trip — in my former body.

I sat with that for a long moment.

The timing wasn’t planned. My friend didn’t know what I was feeling in that moment. He was just sharing a memory. But “Pictures” was the keyword I had chosen months earlier. It was meant to anchor my hope practice. It had just arrived in my hand, literal and real. It happened at the exact moment I needed it most.

That’s not mysticism. That’s not coincidence, exactly either. That’s what happens when you build a practice around something real enough to feel. The keyword finds you back.

Find your keyword. Make it specific. Make it vivid. Ensure it passes the test. It should be short enough to access when the stakes are high. It should also be connected to someone you love. You should feel it somewhere in your body when you say it out loud.

Then show up for it tomorrow morning.

Copyright © 2018 – 2026 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson

What Hope Actually Is

A way of seeing hope I didn’t plan to write — and why it changes how you think about it

I didn’t sit down one day and decide to describe what hope is.

It happened unexpectedly. This is how the best things in the recent phase of my journey have occurred. It was in the middle of something else. Someone asked me a question about how I stay hopeful when the world feels heavy. Before I even thought it through, something surprising came out of my mouth.

Hope is what happens when self-discipline meets adversity and wins.

I sat with that for a while. The more I turned it over, the more I believed it.

It’s not language you’ll find in a dictionary. It’s not academic language — though it’s consistent with the research. Psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades studying hope. He concluded it has two engines. The engines are the belief that you can move forward. It’s also the ability to find a route when the obvious one is blocked. It came from a year of living it, and from a question that deserved a real answer.

I want to unpack it with you — word by word — because I think each piece matters.

What Happens

Notice what this phrase doesn’t say. It doesn’t say hope is a feeling you have. It doesn’t say hope is a gift some people are born with. It doesn’t say hope arrives when conditions are right.

It says hope is what happens — an outcome, a result, something that emerges from a process.

This matters more than it seems. If hope is a feeling, you’re at the mercy of your mood, your circumstances, your neurochemistry on any given morning. If hope is what happens, it is a byproduct of something you do. Then it’s within reach every single day. This is true regardless of how you feel when the alarm goes off.

That shift changed everything for me. I stopped waiting for hope to show up and started doing the things that produce it.

Self-Discipline

This is the walk — the practice, the showing up.

Self-discipline gets a bad reputation. It sounds punishing, restrictive, joyless. I’ve come to think of it differently as the most generous thing you can do for your future self.

Every morning, I get up before I want to. Every workout I show up for when part of me would rather not. Every meal I enjoy with intention instead of convenience. Every time I choose what I’m building over what would be easy, I practice self-discipline. It doesn’t feel like deprivation. It feels like loyalty to the person I decided to become.

Here’s the other thing about self-discipline — it’s personal. What discipline looks like for your journey won’t look like mine. For someone rebuilding after loss, discipline might be getting out of bed and going outside. For someone in recovery, it might be making the call. For someone caring for a sick parent, it might be five minutes a day that belongs only to them.

The form changes but the function is the same. You show up consistently for what matters. You do this even when you don’t feel like it, especially during those times.

Meets Adversity

This is the part that makes hope different from optimism.

Optimism says things will work out. It’s a disposition — warm, helpful, but ultimately passive. Optimism doesn’t require adversity. It floats above it.

Hope meets adversity. It steps toward it, looks it in the eye and says: I see you, you’re real, and I’m not stopping.

Duke women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson captured something close to this in a talk. She gave her players a message that went viral. It has over 8 million views and counting. Her message was simple. It was also eye-opening in the best way. We all wait for life to get easier, but it never does. What changes is you. You handle hard better.

That’s exactly right. Adversity doesn’t go away. You get better at meeting it. In my experience, the meeting is precisely where hope is made. It involves showing up with self-discipline when the hard thing is right in front of you.

The adversity in my life these past few years has been real. A doctor’s visit that made things very clear. The slow loss of my father to Alzheimer’s over a decade. The recent passing of my mother. A body that had accumulated years of choices I wished I’d made differently. And there’s more. I can’t forget to acknowledge today’s world that — if I’m being honest — hasn’t always made it easy to feel hopeful.

I don’t think you get to real hope without real adversity. The cheap version, the kind that pretends everything is fine, isn’t hope. It’s avoidance with better branding.

The hope that holds — the kind worth building — is forged in the hard things. Not despite them. Because of them.

And Wins

This is where I want to be careful. Because “wins” doesn’t mean what you think.

It doesn’t mean the adversity disappears. It doesn’t mean you achieve the goal, hit the number, cross the finish line. It doesn’t mean the hard thing stops being hard.

Winning means you didn’t stop, you came back the next morning, you refused to let the adversity define the outcome.

Some of my biggest wins this past year looked like nothing from the outside. A morning I almost didn’t get up — and then did. A busy work week where I held the thread of the habit even though everything was different. A hard day where my keyword “Pictures” was the only thing that reset me, and it worked.

Those are wins — small ones, but they compound. They add up to a hope practice that is deeper and more durable than anything I’ve had before.

Self-discipline meets adversity and wins. It doesn’t happen once in some dramatic moment of triumph. It happens again and again in the small, unglamorous moments that nobody else sees.

Wide Enough For Everyone

Here’s what I love most about this expression of hope. It doesn’t tell you what your adversity must be. It doesn’t define what your self-discipline must look like. It doesn’t specify what winning means for your journey.

It works in a gym. It works in a grief group. It works in a recovery program. It works in a faith community. It works in a hospital room. It also works in a living room at 3 am when everything feels impossible.

It works because it describes a dynamic, not a prescription. You bring your life to it. This expression of hope holds whatever you bring.

What is your adversity right now? What would self-discipline look like in the face of it? What would winning mean — not eventually, but tomorrow morning?

That’s where your hope practice starts.

Copyright © 2018 – 2026 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson