Life Lesson - SP and Change

Stockdale Paradox - Life Lesson

I sent this out in January of last year but it bears repeating.  For most people, when they find themselves in tough or crappy situations they almost always know what needs to be done.  When you find yourself in this situation you have to make a difficult choice to act or to not act.  You should not confuse doing the very same thing as taking an action, nothing is further from the truth.  If you do the same thing (that is NOT working), it is inaction and you should not be surprised when your situation gets worse. 

Here is a tough truth, you will either opt to act to change your situation and attempt to manage the outcome or you will let the situation run over you and things will change as a result of that.  Another hard truth is that people who have what you want are doing things differently than you are.  And if you are pointing to the person who does not have the same challenges that you do, you are conveniently ignoring the other 95% of people who have the same set of challenges that you do.

Being tough and having courage...having grit is NOT doing the same thing the same way.  It is making hard, tough changes when they are needed.  So if you are lamenting being without something, do something tangible and different.  Here is Stockdale Paradox posting from January:

Admiral James Stockdale was the highest ranking POW in the Vietnam War, he was held for 8 years and tortured brutally over 20 times.  When he was asked which kind of prisoners perished in Vietnam, he said that is easy, it was the optimists.  These were the prisoners who said they would be out by Christmas or Thanksgiving and those days would come and go and eventually enough milestones passed that they lost that essential faith needed to survive and die.  The optimists failed to confront the the reality of their situation and when they were forced to do so it simply became too much for them.

Stockdale accepted the reality of the situation.  He knew he was in hell but rather than failing to confront the reality of the situation he accepted it.  He stepped up and did everything he could do to lift the morale and prolong the lives of fellow prisoners.  He developed communication and milestones that help them communicate and survive.    Here is the Stockdale Paradox:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time…
You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Here is the take away for you.  YOU MUST COMBINE OPTIMISM (SINCERE BELIEF) WITH BRUTAL HONESTY AND A STRONG WILLINGNESS TO TAKE ACTION.

James Stockdale quote "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.”

Very important life lesson here.  Face any trial you have head on and make them defining moments in your life.  Bloody but unbowed.

Kick Ass - Love Dad

Karma II

I am a believer in Karma.  Your actions and words will always carry the weight of consequence for you.

I am also a firm believer that there are things and people I cannot make better by extending myself to them.  In order for me to reach out to you, you have got to be able to reach back in a meaningful way.  Reaching out to someone implies that you are attempting to connect with them.  Connecting to people is as simple as a smile or word that leaves a door open for that person to try and get to know you.

There is a subset of people you will reach out to that are huge mistakes.  When you peel back the onion, you will occasionally not find the beautiful human you expected, you will find a person with significant personal  deficits that should never be part of your life.  It seems like almost simultaneously when you are finding how much they do not belong in your life -  they will find a pressing need to become part of your life.  

There are connections that should be broken, doors that should be closed, and times when you need to have people get out of your life, who are starting to suck the life out of you.  From a Karma standpoint you only owe these people the honesty of clearly stepping away from them.  

Most people know when you are clearly stepping away from them.  For them not to acknowledge that you are stepping away is a form of manipulation they use to keep in contact with you.   Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is to be firm and honest. 

There are people in my life who I thought would be good or casual friends that were train wrecks.  They had to go through their own journey to find their own self worth.  These journeys frequently involved a series of destructive behaviors that involved bad relationships, drug and alcohol abuse and bad personal decisions.  I would have not helped them or me to have been a witness to that journey. 

So use your good deeds at a time, a place, and  a person where they will find some purchase.  Never dump your good deeds into the black hole of someone else's destructive behavior.