CHAPTER 7

POWER IN THE REALITY MODEL

When we are no longer able to change a situation . . . we are challenged to change ourselves.

—VIKTOR FRANKL, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

In chapter 6 we saw examples of people throughout history who had different Belief Windows. The principles on those Belief Windows had some devastating results in some situations and some tremendously positive and fulfilling results in others. See if you can identify if the people in chapter 6 were pessimists, optimists, or realists.

The Pessimist, the Optimist, and the Realist

Let’s take a look at three more definitions: The pessimist, the optimist, and the realist. These are Belief Window issues. Admiral James Stockdale was the highest-ranking officer in Vietnam to be taken as a prisoner of war; he spent seven and a half years in captivity. In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t, Jim Collins talks about the Stockdale paradox. Stockdale discovered three distinct groups in the prison in Hanoi: pessimists, optimists, and realists. He discovered the same three groups of people that Viktor Frankl discovered at Auschwitz during the Second World War. These are Stockdale’s definitions:

• The pessimist sees the brutal facts and quits.

• The optimist has boundless faith and ignores the brutal facts.

• The realist sees the brutal facts and has faith they can be dealt with.

Realists Survive

The pessimists and the optimists never came home from Hanoi; they never got out of Auschwitz. They died there.

I understand why the pessimists died. They saw the brutal facts: “We’re in the middle of southeast Asia, we are eight thousand miles from home, there is no way the marines are going to get in here and save us; we’re toast, guys.” They gave up and died. A lot of physically able people died.

The optimists surprised me. Why would the optimists die? They have boundless faith. They said, “Hey guys, we’re going to be out of here by Christmas. If we’re not out of here by Christmas, we’ll be out of here by Valentine’s Day.” They ignored the brutal facts. When they weren’t out by Christmas and they weren’t out by Valentine’s Day, what happened to the second group? They became pessimists; they died.

The realists survived. Why? They saw the brutal facts: “We’re in the middle of Southeast Asia, we’re eight thousand miles from home, the marines are not coming in here. Guys, we’re going to be here for a long time, so let’s work together to survive this.” They had faith they could deal with it. Some pretty emaciated bodies survived because of that.

The question is, which are you? This is a Belief Window issue. Are we experiencing any kind of adversity right now in our country? Are there any brutal facts we have to deal with right now—in our country and globally? How about at work, or within our own families?

A Principle to Ponder

I’m going to ask you now to consider a principle for your Belief Window. I discovered this principle many years ago when I lost a daughter and granddaughter in a car accident. It was a very difficult time for my wife and me. Let me introduce the principle with this experience.

About three or four weeks after September 11, 2001, I received a call from the office of Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City. He said, “Hyrum, we’ve got a lot of people in pain here because of what happened on 9/11. Would you and your partner Stephen Covey come and do a full-day workshop for the families affected by 9-11?”

“Of course we will,” I answered.

“The Midtown Sheraton Hotel’s going to donate the ballroom and they’ll donate your room, but we can’t pay you.”

“Fine.”

We flew to New York on October 18. I’ve flown into New York hundreds of times, but this time was different: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were gone.

The next morning, the mayor arranged for a tour of Ground Zero. It was just Franklin Covey CEO Bob Whitman, Stephen Covey, and me. A policeman picked us up at 5:00 a.m. and we drove down to the World Trade Center site. The average person could not get anywhere near Ground Zero at that point because sixteen hundred policemen cordoned it off. We went through four separate checkpoints to get there.

About a quarter past five, we were standing at Ground Zero on fifteen feet of compacted debris. We were looking at this huge hole. You can’t imagine the size of that hole unless you were there. I had previously taught many seminars in the World Trade Center; I couldn’t believe it was gone.

The policeman who was our escort started to tell us his story. He was very animated.

“I was here that day.” He pointed. “I was standing right over there. All of a sudden I heard this big boom, and I looked up and all this stuff came flying out of the World Trade Center. It looked like paper at first, and then it started hitting the ground. It was fifty-foot I-beams, killing everybody they hit. I watched thirty-four people jump from the tower. Four of them were holding hands when they jumped. I watched eight firemen lose their lives because people fell on them.”

He looked at me and asked, “Mr. Smith, how many computers do you think there were in the World Trade Center?”

“Well, a lot. Fifty thousand people worked there.”

“We haven’t found one computer.”

“Really, how come?”

“A three-thousand-degree fire, and it is still burning.”

While he was talking, a crane pulled an I-beam out of the rubble. It was dripping molten steel at the bottom even then, more than five weeks after 9/11.

The policeman continued, “You know, when that second building came down, we all thought we were dead, but I crawled under a truck and somehow I survived.”

That’s how our morning started.

We went back up to the Midtown Sheraton; we had to shower because we were covered with soot. We came down to the ballroom, which was designed to hold 1,800 people. There were 2,400 jammed into it. The meeting began with two policemen and two firemen in formal dress uniforms marching in with the American flag. That wiped me out. Then the Girls Choir of Harlem marched in and sang three patriotic songs. Sixty beautiful young women. They blew the roof off the place. I was a mess. I was grateful that Stephen Covey was going to speak first.

Stephen got up and did his thing. Then it was my turn. I made my way to the front of the ballroom. People were sitting on the floor. Before I could open my mouth, about halfway back in the ballroom a fireman jumped out of his chair, shouted at me and said, “Mr. Smith, are you going tell us how to get out of bed in the morning when we just don’t give a crap anymore?”

That’s how it started. This turned out to be one of the toughest, and yet most rewarding, speaking experiences I have ever had.

I said these words to the fireman, and this is what I want you to ponder:

I continued, “What principle, what point am I trying to make here? The fact is, bad things happen to good people, do they not? The fact is we’re not going to get through this mortal experience without some pain. How we choose to deal with that pain is ultimately dependent on what stays on our Belief Window. And by the way, the thing that separates you and me from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we can change our beliefs. We’re in charge of our Belief Window.”

And then I taught this group exactly what I’ve shared with you in this book. It was an electrifying experience.

When I finished, I said, “I will never minimize or put down what happened here on 9/11. This was bad. But just for a moment, would you compare what happened here to what’s happened on this planet in the last one hundred and fifty years? What happened here on 9/11 doesn’t even come up on the scope of ugliness compared to other events in that period. Does it?

“Let’s go back to June sixth, 1944. No, let’s go back to June fifth, 1944. Eisenhower was in a bunker in England. You know what he said to his generals? He wrote about this in his memoirs. He said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve got to throw more kids at that beach tomorrow than they have bullets in the bunker.’ He estimated within five hundred how many he’d lose. So, you know what they did the next day? They threw two hundred thousand kids at that beach in France. Do you know what happened? The Nazis ran out of bullets in the bunker. How often do we reverence that?

“Iwo Jima was supposed to be a four-day battle in the Pacific. It lasted thirty-six days. There were eight thousand marines dead and twenty thousand wounded. There were twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers killed. How often do we reverence that? The killing fields in Cambodia were in the millions. Stalin killed fifty million of his own people.”

Some of the most serene, magnificent, amazing and wonderful people I have ever known are people who have gone through excruciating pain. But they have decided not to be miserable. And by deciding not to be miserable, they don’t make other people miserable. You know what the neat thing about 9/11 was? You couldn’t buy an American flag for about nine months. And it was also suddenly okay for a man to cry.

Are you an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist? We may be any of the three at various times, depending on the situation. If we begin applying the Reality Model, we should start to recognize which of the three we are, in each situation. Gaining this skill will add tremendous value to our personal lives, as well as the lives of others we come in contact with.