Two Generals

Came across this while reading Henry Abbott’s TrueHoop the other day:

“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 discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

—Admiral James Stockdale, as told to Jim Collins in Good to Great

Stockdale’s theory has become known as the Stockdale Paradox, and he (Stockdale) used it to explain why the optimists fared the poorest in Vietnamese POW camps.

In and of itself, it’s a nice theory, but something about it struck me as being oddly familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it has sort of driven me nuts for the better part of a week now.

Then, last night, I remembered where I had come across the same theory, in another book, written about a wholly different war.

“All the same, Assani had reservations. People who thought positively didn’t know what to do when disaster struck. He always thought negatively, which helped him to handle setbacks.”

—Assani Zikiya, as told to Lieve Joris in The Rebels’ Hour

Assani Zikiya is a Congolese man who rose from the lowest ranks of the army all the way up to general, despite the fact he is an ethnic Tutsi in a country at war with Rwandan Tutsis (that’s an oversimplification of incredibly complex war, I know, but it will suffice for a website that’s supposed to be about basketball).

Anyhow, after I finally remembered where I had read that, I was left with conflicting emotions:

Emotion #1) The pleasure in realizing that human beings from all walks of life are capable of insights, and that there is a shared experience between Assani’s struggles in the jungles of the Congo and Stockdale’s struggles in the jungles of Vietnam. That’s a nice feeling to have, that despite the incredible disparate life experiences of these two men – different generations, different upbringings, different everything – they both came to the same, intelligent conclusion when placed in a difficult situation.

Emotion #2) As a reward for his struggles and heroics in Vietnam, Mr. Stockdale has a ‘Paradox’ named after him, receives numerous honors and awards, and eventually is nominated for the office of Vice President of the United States. As a reward for his struggles and heroics in the Congo, Mr. Assani gets to sleep in a tent in a malarial jungle for about 50 weeks a year.

I’ll try to focus on emotion #1, I suppose.