Happiness Is Overrated - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review

In Good to Great, Jim Collins finds a perfect example in James Stockdale, the highest-ranking naval officer held as a prisoner of war during Vietnam.

Over seven years, Stockdale was tortured repeatedly, held in solitary confinement and given no reason to believe he would ever make it out alive. His saving grace was the ability to embrace both optimism and realism concurrently — something Collins named "the Stockdale Paradox."

As Stockdale himself explained it, "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."

Happiness Is Overrated - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review