It starts small.
A single tap, in your prison cell.
It’s Vietnam, early 1970s. You’ve been taken as a POW by the Viet Cong and you’ve been trapped in here for months, or possibly years. You’ve been brutally interrogated. Starved. Beaten. Deprived of sleep. Your commander, James Stockdale, will be tortured over twenty times during his eight years here.
Your first bunkmate was an optimist, but as Stockdale will report years later, optimists are the first to die. Sometimes everything is terrible, and you’ve got to tell the truth to have any hope of survival.
For a while, it seems like the doomsayers are truly in their element, in this prison camp. They are outstanding at reporting how horrible everything is, in their next life they will probably get a job for MSNBC or FOX or gain a ton of followers on Twitter, reminding everyone, mostly themselves, how absolutely hopeless everything is.
But there’s a problem. In this prison camp, the pessimists are the next to die. Every time you tell yourself a terrible story, it rewires your neural pathways and your brain chemistry. You start to feel depressed, lethargic. You lose energy. Your system begins to shut down. Being hopeless is both contagious, and, if left untreated, fatal.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
One might wonder, when the optimists and the pessimists under his command perished, who was left to celebrate Stockdale’s leadership? Well. That brings us to the Stockdale Paradox, his road map to survival under the most horrific circumstances.
First, he says, you must tell the truth — no matter how horrible it might be.
And second, you must still believe that somehow, someday, you will be able to craft some kind of meaning from all that you have endured.
That’s what a story is, right? It’s how we put together facts to create meaning. A survival story is one that takes on the most horrible facts — and still finds a way to create meaning.
But how do you do it? How do you create hope, from the most horrific circumstances?
Tap. Tap. Tap. That’s what hope sounds like, for those who might be wondering.
Today Is Not Tomorrow
We all have been in prison cells, probably not quite as literal as the ones in Vietnam. Most of us probably haven’t had our fingernails pulled off in the hope we’ll surrender vital intelligence, but most of us have hit a point in the story when we think there is nowhere to go from here, nowhere but darkness.
We all reach a point where we think this is where my story ends.
This is when we need the narrative reset. Success starts with the story you tell, we’ve covered that. So often, we think that the world is ending, but really, we just need a better story. We just need to Fight Back.
But how do we start? It’s simpler than you think.
All you have to do to reset your story is to remember what a story is. A story is a thing that never stops changing.
If we lift our eyes up, then life tells us the same thing that stories do, the same thing that Stockdale does. No matter how terrible today, winter always eases into spring. Sunlight always breaks over the horizon. The ice melts, the trees blossom.
The page turns.
The will to rise begins right here, in this simple belief, this trust, this hope, this promise, that no matter how dark, no matter how desperate, no matter how awful, the page will turn, the story will move forward. Something will shift.
To Fight Back, you say, I see the darkness, but I believe in the light.
You say, today everything is terrible. But today is not tomorrow.
To quote James Stockdale himself, no matter how grim life may become, “I never lost faith in the end of the story.”
This sounds like poetry, but I’m quoting Ph.D.s. Kelly McGonigal from Stanford has spent decades measuring the impact of a narrative reset, and she is used to skepticism about its efficacy.
“We are used to believing that we need to change everything about our lives first, and then we will be happy, or healthy, or whatever it is we think we want to experience. The science of mindsets says we have it backwards. Changing our minds can be a catalyst for all the other changes we want to make in our lives. But first, we may need to convince ourselves that such a change is possible.” — Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress
In every act of heroism, the first thing that the hero does is decide to believe that one day, the story will change. The hero decides to fight back.
But how? How do you start?
Tap. Tap tap tap.
Big Problems. Small Solutions.
In the Hanoi prison camp, Stockdale created a “stepwise system” for his prisoners to manage the torture, tapping in the prison cells so they could communicate with each other. He had them learn the guard’s routine, measure the intervals between circuits.
Tap four times to indicate four minutes since the last pass through.
Keep note in your head of how many days since the last round of interrogations.
Note the guard change. Mark that down. Tap it out.
Did his interventions make a difference? Did it lessen the pain of the torture? Did it lead to an escape? Did it facilitate their rescue?
Probably not. But it definitely saved their lives.
When we’re dealing with a traumatic situation, any action that we take changes the chemicals in our brain. A simple tap on the walls of your prison cell releases chemicals of hope and optimism. Instead of feeling depressed and lethargic, you start to feel empowered and optimistic. It doesn’t matter what the action is. What matters is that you act. Tapping codes is what Stockdale did, but any other action could have worked as well. The point is, by giving them something to do, he changed the narrative inside their brains. And with what we know about mindset science today, that was likely a definitive act for their survival.
In behavioral economics, we call it a “signal change.” It’s the thing that you do to signal a change is coming. It’s the single tap. It’s the first step, no matter how small.
In the documentary film The Martian, Matt Damon is an astronaut abandoned on Mars, no way to communicate with an Earth that believes him long dead. At the end of the film, safely back on earth, he reports on how he survived:
“Did I think I was going to die? Yes absolutely and that’s one thing you need to know going in because it’s going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point, everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home."
Most of us have never been stranded on Mars, but most of us have faced huge problems and we tend to think that what is required is a huge solution. And when we are in a prison cell, starving, afraid, huge solutions feel overwhelming. Huge solutions feel impossible.
But heroism is not huge. Heroism starts very, very small. Chip and Dan Heath, in their study on social movements, find again and again: it is almost never big actions that drive change. It is a very small action, that serves as a catalyst for what comes next.
Kelly McGonigal, again: “Many problems are deeply rooted, and yet one of the themes that (we find) again and again… is that small shifts in mindset can trigger a cascade of changes so profound that they test the limits of what seems possible.”
So. You’re in the cell, whatever your cell might be.
Maybe your cell is the conviction that the planet is melting, or your waistline is expanding. It might be your fears that late stage capitalism is inherently unsustainable, or that your romantic life is even less so. You can’t see a way out. You can’t even imagine it.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap tap.
You stir. You lift your head, or maybe you don’t even have the strength to do that right now. It’s okay if you don’t. All you have to do is listen, to start.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
What is it?
It’s the rest of the story. As gentle as an instruction, count how many times the guard is circling the perimeter.
So you tap back. And when you tap back, something inside of you shifts. A little bit of faith. Like a spark in a cold dark cell. A single spark.
Never lose faith in the end of the story.
For today, decide that you’re going to fight back.
For today, if it’s all you have in you, just decide to believe that light is possible, no matter how dark your cell.
That’s not enough, you might say. One tap doesn’t open the doors. One tap doesn’t actually change anything.
I understand. Next week, we’ll break free.
Next week, Act Three.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.
Great insights. This was very interesting. I had never read about this story. I remember when I was young the “shift” I experienced when I read Viktor, Frankl book “Man’s search for meaning” this reminds me of that time. You are a talented writer Robyn. ❤️
Wow!