Stockdale Paradox

The term "Stockdale Paradox" was coined in Good to Great—a business book with the subtitle "Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't" that became a mainstream bestseller after its release in 2001.

Like most mainstream-popular business works, there's a lot to criticize in this book and its thesis statement, but the Stockdale Paradox concept it introduced has successfully cross-pollinated into other spaces, including what we might broadly call the world of "survival psychology"—a pseudo-field that goes by many names and which sprawls across many practices and areas of research, all of them connected to the concept of making it through disasters of various kinds, psychologically intact.

This paradox, which is actually less a paradox and more a way of framing one's circumstances in what will generally be a productive way, is named after James Stockdale, a high-ranking naval officer who was captured during the Vietnam War and then tortured and tormented for more than seven years.