Keep absolute faith that you will prevail in the end, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your present situation.
Collins named it in Good to Great (2001) after Admiral James Stockdale, the senior American prisoner of war in Hanoi. Stockdale told him that the prisoners who died first were the optimists: the ones certain they would be home by Christmas, then by Easter, until the accumulated disappointments broke them. The formula pairs unconditional confidence about the outcome with unsentimental realism about the situation, which most people treat as opposites.
In practice
- A founder tells the board that the company will survive, and in the same meeting that the current plan will not get it there.
- A patient accepts an unwelcome prognosis and keeps every appointment anyway.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that forecasting and motivating are separate jobs: unsparing assessment prevents wishful planning, and unconditional confidence sustains effort through setbacks.
- In its favour
- It is consistent with research on defensive pessimism, where anxious anticipation improves preparation, and with the finding that unrealistic optimism about timelines predicts disappointment.
- Against it
- The evidence is Stockdale's testimony and Collins's case studies rather than controlled work, and research on optimism and coping is more mixed than the maxim implies.
- Standing
- The evidence is Stockdale's testimony and Collins's case studies rather than controlled work, and the research on optimism and coping is more mixed than the maxim suggests.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition