Faith must underpin the work. If you don't believe in practice then it won't work for you, not deeply anyway, not on your soul. Ultimately it's not about how good you are at your chosen discipline, it's about how good you are as a person. And to be good – to be capable of love on all levels – requires, first and foremost, faith. And to improve, to become better, surprisingly maybe, requires hope. In fact, this is what hope is: belief in the possibility of improvement, in a better future.