James Stockdale

Like Simon Sinek, for example, he's an out-and-out optimist.

His podcast is called something like something as it has optimist in the title now i think he pretty much has the same definition as a realist but whenever i'm talking about the difference between optimists and realists it comes from this blog that i wrote a couple of weeks after my accident where i broke my back and the the blog's called optimist realist or something else and it it draws on the experiences of admiral stockdale who was a prisoner of war at the height of the vietnam war and He was incarcerated for nearly eight years, often in solitary confinement, didn't know if or when he was going to get out.

And he did get out.

And he went on to explain that the ones...

I'm what I would call, I guess, Dean and Kent as a realistic optimist.

I, it goes after the story of James Stockdale, who was a Vietnam prisoner who was asked what made him, how he survived.

And you've heard the story.

He said, I was not either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic.

We know that.

So he was, I think what's really interesting, right? And because it parallels with another famous stoic, which is James Stockdale, is being a naval aviator, right? I think he was a torpedo bomber pilot and he had witnessed this horrible stuff in the war, right? And he came out of that and sort of always kind of had this humanist view to him.

Now he had a dark side too, I'm going to say that.

We're not going to have time to go into that today.

I mean, our crew in the Navy are called wafus by the other branches, which means wet and effing useless, because we're always wet, we're always ditching, right? And so especially, I think, in the air crew world, developed that culture of hardiness.

And we saw that in the Vietnam War in the Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where Jim Stockdale was.

He's a bit of a personal hero of mine.

Most of the guys in there were our crew, and they were very, very hardy.

It becomes the North Star about how you make decisions.

And then it's about cultivating that challenge orientation in there.

I think one thing that's brilliant here is the Stockdale paradox, right? Which came from Jim Stockdale, Hanoi Hilton.

The first day that he was in there and he realized he was a senior officer, he got all the men together and he said to them, gentlemen, steal yourselves, five years at least.

There's I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Stockdale Paradox.

And James Stockdale was, I believe he was the longest held prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.

He was a naval officer.

I think he was shot down over North Vietnam, spent seven, eight years or something in captivity, was tortured multiple times.

Can I talk? Can I talk? Can I talk now? I didn't remember his name.

Admiral Stockdale.

That was a disaster.

Who am I? Why am I here? You know? But yeah, there's always candidate recruiting going on to give yourself a better playing field.