Trials and Tribulations
I think a lot about people who have survived terrible trials, and thrived. I know one guy who lost both his parents in a car accident when he was young, after having suffered abuse at their hands. While his brother committed suicide, and his sister became addicted to drugs, he never blamed his parents or their death for his life, and became a successful screenwriter in LA (who has written a bunch of movies you've already seen). I wonder sometimes: what did he have that his brother and sister didn't have? Where did he find the strength? I also like reading about people like Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, or the guys in Touching the Void (book and documentary), one of whom clawed his way out of a crevasse he'd fallen into, and crawled, with innumerable broken bones, frostbite, and no food or water -- for something like five days to the bottom of the mountain.
The thing I've noticed is that people who have suffered and survived terrible things are stronger than the rest of us, and they almost invariably become existentialists, and obsess about their own responsibility for making the meaning in their lives. Here, for example, is a quote from Fernando Flores, who was imprisoned in post-Allende Chile for three years:
Even the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy says the same thing: responsibility responsibility responsibility. Another story I read recently was in a fantastic post from Bnoopy. I wish Bnoopy were updated more frequently. It's my favorite entrepreneur blog, but God knows it's hard to run a company and have time left over for blogging. Bnoopy (aka Joe Kraus) wrote about the Stockdale Paradox, which Jim Collins wrote about in the book Good to Great. The Stockdale Paradox is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the most senior officer imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton during the Viet Nam war. He was in prison for 8 years, tortured 15 times, in leg irons for two years and in solitary confinement for 4 years. How did Stockdale survive when he didn't know if he were going to live or die or see his family again?
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, 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 a hundred meters 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."
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, "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."
You can read part of the chapter he got it from in Jim Collins book Good to Great online.
