What is the Stockdale Paradox?
It’s a way to navigate difficult challenges— by combining faith and realism.
You must maintain faith that you will prevail in the end, no matter how distant that is. BUT you must balance that with realism, and confront your current reality.
It comes from the experience of Admiral James Stockdale who ended up in a Vietnamese POW camp during the war. He would only be rescued 5 years later!
Stockdale described his approach in an interview with Jim Collins, explaining,
“I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
The Problem with Optimism
Who succumbed first when it came to surviving these challenging experiences?
The optimists
Stockdale Again:
“They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Compare this to Viktor Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps.
Frankl also related a similar idea to Stockdale, talking about the power of “tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy.”
Stockdale didn’t credit the pessimists with much better success than the optimists, saying that they gave in soon afterwards.
Instead he suggests finding that almost paradoxical balance between acceptance of the brutal reality of now, with unwavering faith in how you will make it in the end.
I also just wrote about being blindly optimistic here about health, and why that isn’t the approach I would ultimately like to take
Read it here: Working on Your Health is Really Hard- And That’s Okay! - Coach Javiie
Read more at: ModelThinkers - Stockdale Paradox
Go one level up : Health Mindsets MOC You may also be interested in: Paradoxes of Health