I recently came across the story of Admiral Jim Stockdale as described in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Stockdale was imprisoned in the “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp from 1965 to 1973, during which time he was repeatedly tortured. When Collins asked him how he was able to endure, Stockdale responded, “I never lost faith in the end of the story . . . I never doubted not only that I would get out, but that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life . . .”
When asked who didn’t survive the camp, Stockdale offered a surprising response. “Oh that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists. 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 would die of a broken heart.”
After a long pause, Stockdale then 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.”
Though not written with respect to religious faith, I can’t help but wonder how Stockdale’s sentiments apply in that realm. I wonder how Stockdale became sure that he would survive and whether there is anything in my life that provides similar grounding. I’m still sorting out how to balance hope for joy in this life (and searching for the basis of that hope) with the reality that mortality is hard—potentially brutal—and that hope is based on a better world to come (Ether 12:4). I usually think of prevailing as something that will happen after death and am in awe at Stockdale’s ability to cling to a temporal victory in the face of such bleakness.
How do you balance optimism, which I had never considered as potentially negative, with the discipline to face difficult realities? Do you think of prevailing as a mortal event or eternal (or both?) The conversation may have to wait a bit until our comments are back up, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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