“You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

This concept is known as the Stockdale Paradox, and I first learned about it in Jim Collins’ masterpiece, Good to Great. I have also lived in the realities of the Stockdale Paradox often throughout my career.

As a college student, I started CARPOOL at Texas A&M, the nation’s largest program to reduce drunk driving.  The semester before we officially launched, we accepted the first 250 CARPOOL members, and we worked to address every aspect of the complex operations ahead. 

• We convinced the university to add CARPOOL's name and number to the back of all 50,000 student IDs.
• We convinced PrimeCo to donate 16 cell phones with unlimited free minutes.
• We convinced a local apartment owner to give us a 2-bedroom setup to serve as headquarters.

But we still had a major problem to solve. Only months before operations began, we had no vehicles.

We couldn’t get cars donated because we needed to have insurance and fleet maintenance. Not to mention, we needed 15-20 cars per weekend, and getting even one donated vehicle was daunting. We also didn’t want our volunteer crew of college kids using their own cars due to liability and vehicle maintenance concerns.

We hit additional roadblocks when we realized that we couldn’t rent the needed vehicles because we needed to be at least 25 years old.

Yet we remained confident we would find a way to solve the vehicle puzzle, and that is what we told our team members as they left for summer break. With only a few months before our operations were set to launch, we shifted tactics and tried a new angle with the rental car companies. Instead of explaining why we needed the cars, we explained the benefits of renting them to us and the goodwill it would create. Enterprise Rent-A-Car connected with this promise of guaranteed rentals every weekend, and they found a way to overcome the age restriction within their system, ultimately renting thousands of vehicles to me personally for the first few years of CARPOOL. They also played a key role in CARPOOL’s nationwide expansion, as every sister program we launched also utilized their services.  

I remember how difficult it was to spend months trying to solve the need for vehicles when most days reinforced the rhetoric that what we were attempting was impossible. Without a solution, our work would be doomed. Instead of giving in to despair or shutting down our work, we decided to maintain unwavering faith that we could and would prevail in the end. We were honest with ourselves about the difficulties ahead while staying disciplined enough to confront the brutal facts of our reality.

Seeing the fruits of this undying belief in a pathway forward despite the hardships ahead, I’ve continued to step into the Stockdale Paradox many more times throughout my professional journey, including today. How can you step into a 10-year-old company like Howdy Homemade Ice Cream with only a handful of stores and create a new trajectory that launches the brand to 60 new stores in six years WITHOUT sacrificing the mission to provide meaningful jobs to adults with special needs OR the super-premium quality of the ice cream?  

We maintain unwavering faith that we can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”