Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon and a writer, meditates on the idea of hope -- the desire to become our better selves and make a better world. It's a thoughtful 12 minutes that will help you focus on the road ahead.

So, the lesson is very clear. The lesson is that our patient -- the world, and the disadvantaged of the world -- that patient deserves our compassion. But beyond our compassion, and far greater than compassion, is our moral imagination and our identification with each individual who lives in that world, not to think of them as a huge forest, but as individual trees... So, here we are. We are, should be, morally committed to being the healer of the world. And we have had examples over and over and over again -- you've just heard one in the last 15 minutes -- of people who have not only had that commitment, but had the charisma, the brilliance -- and I think in this room it's easy to use the word brilliant, my God -- the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest, and who no doubt will continue to succeed, as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause.

Read the source article at TED: Ideas worth spreading

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