Why optimism isn’t always helpful

I wonder if optimism isn’t particularly helpful at times like these in the church?

I’m not for a moment suggesting that pessimism is the appropriate stance either, but I was struck by discovering ‘The Stockdale Paradox’. (You can read more about it here… )

The basic premise of the Stockdale Paradox is that optimism is easily defeated where we have no timescales.  Optimism is, so this theory would suggest, the worst thing to have when things are bad and the timescale for that changing is unknown.

Why?

Optimists tend to think that ‘By [INSERT ARBITRARY DATE] things will be better / have changed.  The arbitrary date bit is important.  These are deadlines that are hoped for rather than given or planed.  Maybe by next week things will change.  Maybe by next month things will be back to normal.  Surely by Christmas we will know what’s happening and be able to get on with it.

Nobody knows if things will have happened by then.  Optimists just hope that they will.

And then they don’t. 

James Stockdale saw it as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  When asked who faired worst his answer was ‘The optimists’.

Optimist are met with an ever increasing flow of disappointment as these deadlines come and go and nothing has changed.  Or things have got worse.  In the face of that kind of outlook life becomes demoralising.

And therein lies the paradox.  Optimists are positive people who hope for the best.  If they aren’t coping with this uncertainty then what hope is there for the rest of us?

Instead, Jim Collins in his book ‘Good to Great’ suggests Stockdale teaches us that a mixture of faith that things will eventually happen/improve/change, faith that you can never lose, coupled with a pretty brutal realism which appreciates where we are at any moment.  Together they form the balance needed when times are tough.