The Stockdale Paradox

Have you ever read something and thought: Wow, I wish I’d written that idea! There are gems of thoughts so profound they can change the course of your day, your career, or your life. Well I’ve been reading “Good To Great” by Jim Collins again. I’ve come across a principal that I feel we must re-embrace as FGE pursues sustained momentum.

The Stockdale Paradox*

“Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties;

and at the same time

Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
(p. 86 *Named after Admiral Jim Stockdale)

Simple, right? And yet so profound!

I have faith that God will prevail in the end whether or not our little company does and that is where I find my comfort and hope. With that said, however, I believe that FGE will prevail in the end as well. We daily seek for God’s Will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We earnestly appeal to see how we can be part of His mission and plan. He has brought us this far; we are confident that he will finish the good work that He’s begun!

We have dreams to create family friendly entertainment that makes you want to dance or reflect or dream or reach out to someone but most importantly we want to inspire you to change your world for the better! We are not looking to make millions of dollars or create a huge conglomerate company; we want to keep it simple. We want to work with friends with whom we have a shared vision. We want to create and live with integrity and love. No matter what the difficulties, we know that our faith will sustain us and that God will prevail.

Now, the more difficult part of this paradox for us is “confronting the brutal facts of our current reality.” Do you know how many movies are released just in the U.S. each year? It’s over a thousand a year. Add to that the number of movies, created by little independent teams just like us! It can be overwhelming at times to think of the odds that SWAY will make an impact on anyone other than the LeJeune family! However, we feel called to accomplish this and so we persevere.

Another brutal fact is that we have never attempted something of this magnitude before. God has taken us step by step and day by day to teach us new concepts (and software programs) and to introduce us to new people who help us accomplish this seemingly impossible challenge. If God had allowed us to see a year into the future last January, I’m confident that we would have been so overwhelmed we wouldn’t have even tried. We are still finding sustained momentum every day.

Another brutal fact is that we don’t have the financial resources today to finish what we’ve started. But we trust God to know that he will provide. He has so far! (Check out our project on KICKSTARTER @ www.kickstarter.com/projects/swaymovie/sway.) God is using so many different tools and so many different people to make this project a success.

Let me finish this blog with the following paragraph from the “Good to Great” book:

“ . . . the key elements of greatness are deceptively simple and straightforward. The good-to-great leaders were able to strip away so much noise and clutter and just focus on the few things that would have the greatest impact. They were able to do so in large part because the operated from both sides of the Stockdale Paradox, never letting one side overshadow the other. If you are able to adopt this dual pattern, you will dramatically increase the odds of making a series of good decisions and ultimately discovering a simple, yet deeply insightful, concept for making the really big choices. And once you have that simple, unifying concept, you will be very close to making a sustained transition to breakthrough results.” (p. 87)

Feeling Good Entertainment's (FGE) new website debuted to very little fanfare two weeks ago. It is our official company website. Please check it out when you have a minute. We’d love any feedback or ideas that you want to share! You can find it at www.feelinggoodentertainment.com. Sarah made this website in her Website Design class at Austin Peay – I think she deserves an A. We’ll see what the professor has to say!

God bless.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
Matthew 6:9-13