BOOK NOTES
Option B
Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
Book Written By Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant
13 JANUARY 2018
“…A vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” If you’ve ever experience loss or trauma of any kind, the void as described by Sheryl Sandberg is likely a familiarly darkly and uncomfortable one.
Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and the founder of Leanin.org. She wrote her book, “Option B,” after the sudden death of her husband while they were vacationing with their kids in 2015. The tragedy left her with acute pains from grief, feelings of loneliness and helplessness for her children, and hopelessness for ever experiencing joy again.
With the help of Adam Grant, her psychologist friend from Wharton, Sheryl gives readers compelling and tangible ways people can overcome profound hardships and find strength and resilience in the face of painful adversities.
“Option A is not available, so let’s kick the shit out of Option B.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
“[Resilience] comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck… I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
There is always something to be thankful for.
Practice gratitude. Even when Option A doesn’t pan out, we still have options.There is always something to be thankful for.
“Although it can be extremely difficult to grasp, the disappearance of one possible self can free us to imagine a new possible self.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
When someone is hurting, just show up. Knowing that you are there is what makes a difference.
“We find our humanity—our will to live and our ability to love—in our connections to one another.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
People can’t become what they don’t see. If you don’t see growth as possible, you won’t find it.
We must learn to have “grounded hope” – the understanding that if we take action we can make things better.
“Well all need other people… but at the end of the day, the only person who can move my life ahead, make me happy, and build a new life for my kids, is me.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
“I thought resilience was the capacity to endure pain… Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity—and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.”
Sheryl Sandberg
Tragedy does not have to be personal, pervasive, or permanent, but resilience can be.
Three P’s stunt recovery:
Personalization (belief that we are at fault), Pervasiveness (that it will affect all areas of our life), and Permanence (that the aftershocks of an event will last forever).
If you can keep these in perspective, you are more likely to decrease depression, improve performance, and recover more quickly from trauma.
“Resilience] comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck… I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
Make friends with your own demons.
When life really sucks, accept it. Instead of being surprised by negative feelings, expect them. Acceptance lessens the pain.
Post-traumatic growth is possible, and so is pre-traumatic growth.
It’s possible to fall forward and grow in these five ways:
- Finding personal strength
- Gaining appreciation
- Forming deeper relationships
- Discovering more meaning in life
- Seeing new possibilities
Also, you don’t have to experience tragedy personally to build your resilience for whatever lies ahead.
“Even when we’re in great distress, joy can still be found in moments we seize and moments we create. Cooking. Dancing. Hiking. Praying. Driving. Singing Billy Joel songs off-key. All of these can provide relief from pain. And when these moments add up, we find that they give us more than happiness; they also give us strength.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
“I am more vulnerable than I thought, but much stronger than I ever imagined.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”
Other quoteable content:
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
“In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
“Some things in life cannot be fixed, they can only be carried.” Megan Devine
“Let me fall if I must fall. The one I become will catch me.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Holocaust survivor and Psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl
“Psychologists have found that over time we usually regret the chances we missed, not the chances we took.”
“A day of joy is fifteen minutes. A day of pain is fifteen years. No one pretends this is easy, but the job of life is to make those fifteen minutes into fifteen years and those fifteen years into fifteen minutes.”
“Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. It comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck. It comes from analyzing how we process grief and from simply accepting that grief. Sometimes we have less control than we think. Other times we have more. I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”
Lessons & Implications for Businesses:
Teams that focus on learning from failure outperform those that don’t.
When it’s safe to talk about mistakes, people are more likely to report errors and less likely to make them.
Adam has published five different studies demonstrating that meaningful work buffers against burnout.
In companies, nonprofits, government, and the military, he finds that the more people believe their jobs help others, the less emotionally exhausted they feel at work and the less depressed they feel in life. And on days when people think they’ve had a meaningful impact on others at work, they feel more energized at home and more capable of dealing with difficult situations.
“When companies fail, it’s usually for reasons that almost everyone knows but almost no one has voiced. When someone isn’t making good decisions, few have the guts to tell that person, especially if that person is the boss.”
Sheryl Sandberg, author of “Option B”