When you’re trying to transform the global payments system with a staff of 200 people, a) things are constantly on fire and b) there are lots of good reasons to believe you’ll fail. That company is Stripe, the online payments powerhouse that disrupted an entire industry.Ī former engineering manager for Stripe notes that optimism has long been a “top-level value” for the company: A $20 billion company that embodies the Stockdale Paradox We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you □Ĭheck out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data. You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. They labeled it the Stockdale Paradox and described it like so: And he sent intelligence information to his wife, hidden in the seemingly innocent letters he wrote.Īuthor Jim Collins and his team observed a similar mindset in the good-to-great companies.He developed a milestone system that helped them deal with torture.He created a tapping code so they could communicate with each other.Stockdale knew he was in hell, but, rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to lift the morale and prolong the lives of his fellow prisoners. Above: James Stockdale – namesake of The Stockdale Paradox – receiving the Medal of Honor Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset: he accepted the reality of his situation. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn’t handle it. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prison mates who failed to make it out of there alive. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Stockdale was tortured more than twenty times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to return home and see his wife again.Īnd yet, as Stockdale revealed in Good to Great, he never lost faith during his ordeal: The Stockdale Paradox is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. How understanding the paradox can help you succeed with your online business.An example of a $20 billion company that embodies the paradox.What the Stockdale Paradox is and who it’s named after.Smoking cannot be interpreted as a choice made in the presence of full information about the potential harm.The Stockdale Paradox is a concept coined by author Jim Collins in the book Good to Great. Conclusion: Smokers underestimate their risk of lung cancer both relative to other smokers and to non-smokers and demonstrate other misunderstandings of smoking risks. Substantial proportions of smokers and former smokers agree with several myths, more than half agreeing that exercise undoes most smoking effects. Furthermore, their perceived risk of lung cancer and of cancer in general barely increases with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and their estimates of their risk of cancer are actually slightly lower than their estimates of their risk of lung cancer. Results: Smokers underestimated their relative risk compared to non-smokers and, contrary to previous interview surveys, believed they have a lower risk of developing lung cancer than the average smoker. For key questions, separate samples of smokers were asked either about their own risk or about the risk of the average smoker. Methodology: A US national telephone survey (n = 6369 1245 current smokers) posed a variety of questions designed to examine beliefs about the risks of smoking. We avoided the measurement problems of past studies and examined responses to a number of new questions to assess different aspects of smokers' perceptions. Whereas smokers claim that they are less at risk than the average smoker on self administered questionnaires, this unrealistic optimism has not been found in telephone or face-to-face interviews. Objective: Past studies have produced ambiguous or inconsistent results when testing whether smokers actually underestimate their own risks of experiencing tobacco related illness.
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