The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The meaning of the quote
On September 9, 1965, US Navy pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He spent nearly 8 years as a prisoner of war in the camp known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was tortured more than 20 times.
Decades later, the business writer Jim Collins asked him which prisoners didn’t make it home. Stockdale said it was the optimists. They told each other they’d be out by Christmas, then by Easter, then by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas again, until the disappointment broke them.
Stockdale survived by holding on to 2 ideas that seem to cancel each other out. In the book Good to Great, Collins shares how Stockdale put 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.”
Fitzgerald’s quote describes the same skill. Most of us keep one idea and drop the other. We either face the hard facts and give up, or we keep our hope alive by ignoring the facts. The quote says a sharp mind keeps both and still acts.
Fitzgerald wrote it in February 1936, in an essay called “The Crack-Up” for Esquire magazine. He was 39, deep in debt and close to a breakdown. Right after the quote, he gives an example. A person should be able to see that things are hopeless and still be determined to change them.
He wrote that line from inside the hopeless situation he was describing.
A student who failed a test can admit she doesn’t understand the topic yet and still believe she’ll pass the next one. A founder can know that most new businesses fail and still open the shop. In an argument, you can hold a strong opinion and still accept that you might be wrong. That’s what lets you say we were both wrong when it’s over.
Psychologists call the discomfort of holding 2 clashing beliefs cognitive dissonance, and people tend to ease it by dropping one of them.
Fitzgerald’s test also asks you to keep functioning while you hold both ideas. Stockdale did it while leading the other prisoners in the camp and planning for the day he would go home.
Action steps
Pick one problem you keep worrying about and work through these steps with it.
- Write down both sides. On the left, write the hard facts as they are. On the right, write what you still believe you can do about them.
Don’t cross anything out. Both lists are true. - Keep the hope and drop the date. Stockdale’s optimists broke because they bet on Christmas. If the timing isn’t up to you, believe you’ll get there but don’t promise yourself when.
- Take the next step today. Send the email, book the practice session or make the phone call. Do it even if the hard facts haven’t changed yet.
About the author
In the summer of 1919, Zelda Sayre gave back F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s engagement ring. He was 22, stuck in an advertising job he hated and his short stories weren’t selling. She didn’t believe he could support her.
Fitzgerald quit his job and moved back into his parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota, to rewrite an old novel. This Side of Paradise came out on March 26, 1920. The first printing of 3,000 copies sold out in 3 days, and a week after publication he married Zelda in New York.
5 years later he published The Great Gatsby. It sold fewer than 25,000 copies in his lifetime.
By 1936 the fame and money were gone, Zelda was in a psychiatric hospital and Fitzgerald owed money everywhere.
In August 1940, his royalty statement paid him $13.13. He died of a heart attack that December, at 44, believing he had failed.
In 1945, the US military printed 155,000 free copies of The Great Gatsby for soldiers fighting in World War II. Those pocket-size paperbacks helped start a revival, and the book has since sold more than 25 million copies.
Fitzgerald never saw any of it.
He wrote the quote 29 years before Stockdale’s plane went down, on the first page of his “Crack-Up” essay. You can find it in the book The Crack-Up, together with the 2 essays that followed it, his notebooks and letters from friends like Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot.
Resources
- The Crack-Up (Book)
- The Great Gatsby (Book)
- Good to Great (Book)
- The Stockdale Paradox (Article)
- The Not-So-Great Gatsby (Article)
- Cognitive dissonance (Wikipedia)
- We were both wrong (Article)
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