The Stockdale Paradox is the discipline of holding unwavering faith that one will prevail in the end while confronting the most brutal facts of one's current reality, a pairing named by Jim Collins after Admiral James Stockdale.
James Bond Stockdale (December 23, 1923 – July 5, 2005) was a United States Navy vice admiral and aviator awarded the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War, during which he was a prisoner of war for over seven years. When Collins asked him which prisoners failed to make it out, Stockdale answered that it was the optimists, who kept fixing on release dates that came and went until they lost heart. Survival, in his account, depended on never confusing faith in the final outcome with a refusal to face present conditions.
The paradox separates resilience from optimism: optimism predicts a good outcome on a schedule, while the Stockdale Paradox keeps the belief in the outcome and drops the schedule, leaving attention free for reality as it is. Collins popularized the idea in his 2001 book Good to Great, where he found the same pattern in companies that made the leap to sustained results:
Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call "The Stockdale Paradox": you must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.