We will get through this. However long it takes.

I keep reminding myself of the Stockdale Paradox as described by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great.
“We must maintain an unwavering belief that we will prevail at the end, regardless of the difficulties we face along the way. We must also confront the brutal facts of our current reality, whatever it may be.”
Read more about the Stockdale Paradox below.

In our current reality there are a lot of unknowns.
How long will the social isolation/quarantine last?
Can we flatten the curve?
What will be the effect on the economy?
Will I have a job?
How many people will die?
When will I be able to see friends/ family/ colleagues/ customers?
We have to accept that we do not have control over these variables. We can control our behavior – social distancing, performing our jobs etc- but this pandemic is way bigger than us.

Easter is over (Passover too). Spring is here (do take a moment to enjoy the beautiful flowering trees). Summer will come.

Don’t set yourself a date by when this will be over. It is not about the exact time it will happen.

As Stockdale described, the optimists, setting an end date to their misery in captivity, and getting disappointed over and over again are the ones who did not make it home. The bigger the expectation the bigger the disappointment.
Just know that IT WILL END. Whenever that is. That is what is important for all of us to remember.

We will prevail.

Jim Collins describing the Stockdale Paradox in this excerpt from his book Good to Great:
“The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military office in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise system–-after x minutes, you can say certain things–-that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for twenty-five letters, c doubling in for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down. After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor.
How on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “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.”
Finally I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused given what he’d said earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. 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 the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.””

Stay safe and healthy!
Miki Feldman Simon,
Founder & CEO,  IamBackatWork