I few months ago I started a thread asking for good books about individuals or people who have prevailed against overwhelming odds and that resulted in some great reads for me the past few months. I had forgotten about the lessons that Admiral Stockdale offered from his time as a POW during the Vietnam war. He was the most senior POW at Hanoi Hilton and he paid the price for this. I read this book as a new butter bar when in the Army back in 1984 when the book was published. Certainly a great book for preppers and its along the line of what I was looking for.
I stumbled across an article today that reflected on Admiral Stockdale, jarring my memory, and thought I would share this link:
Jim Collins - Concepts - The Stockdale Paradox
A little snippet from the article:
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “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.”
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, 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.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “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.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
We need to embrace the coming suck, deal with it, AND have the faith that we are going to prevail. I think I needed to be reminded about the paradox. You need both to survive.
I think we are at the stage where we need to heed his advice.
